In celebration of The Queen’s Green Canopy project, Regeneration is a new exhibition to help promote tree planting: a vital strand of the environmental crisis recovery strategy. Trees are the lungs of the planet and this exhibition showcases a diverse range of approach, style media, and scale – and interpretation of this uplifting and positive subject.
Trees provide a wonderfully versatile subject for artists, not only in terms of the rich variety of form, texture and colour they provide, whether individually or collectively, but also through the wealth of association – myth, folklore, religious and symbolic significance, that they have come to embody over many centuries. In Britain, trees as a subject have inspired artists from Gainsborough and Constable through to the Pre-Raphaelites, the Neo-Romantics and the Ruralists. Piet Mondrian and Victor Pasmore used the tree as a device to turn abstract and Paul Nash famously stated that he loved and worshipped trees and believed they were people.
The Arborealists were founded in 2013 by artist and curator Tim Craven following the seminal exhibition Under the Greenwood: Picturing the British Tree, staged at St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington, in the heart of the New Forest. The Arborealists are a loose association of some 50 professional artists of diverse art practice who share the subject of the tree. Although united by their subject, the artists employ a diverse range of working practices: scale, medium, philosophy, style and technique. The results are by turn dramatic and contemplative, expressive, abstracted, hyperreal and surreal and they demonstrate that trees still have a deep relevance in contemporary art and retain their power to move us as a vital element in our landscape
The group is far flung with members from Wales and the borders to East Anglia and London and every southern county from Kent to Cornwall. The group enjoys a national profile and have already staged 26 exhibitions to critical acclaim in the UK, France and Gibraltar with many more planned for the future, including site-specific projects. The Arborealists have forged successful partnerships with National Park Authorities, Areas of Outstanding National Beauty and The Woodland Trust and The National Trust.
Image: ‘Amongst the Trees, Bluebell Wood, Perivale’ by David Wiseman, acrylic on canvas.