Cathedral Forest
The Cathedral Forest, June 2020, Acrylic on canvas with metallic ink, 30”x24”
'In Shakespeare’s plays, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself often, paradoxically, by getting lost.'
Music: ‘Waldesstille’ (Peace of the Woods) from Lyric Pieces, Op. 71, No. 4 in B Major by Edward Grieg (1843-1907)
“For Edward Thomas and for the Chinese, wood is the fifth element. Nothing can compete with these larger-than-life organisms for signaling changes in the natural world. They are our barometers of the weather and the changing seasons. We tell the time of year by them.
Trees have the capacity to rise to the heavens and to connect us to the sky, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm us through winter. Once inside a wood, you walk on something very like the seabed, looking up at the canopy of leaves as if it were the surface of the water, filtering the descending shafts of sunlight and dappling everything.”
From Wildwood by Roger Deakin
“The Gothic cathedral with its lofty interior, which rises vertically toward the sky and then curves into a vault from all sides, like so many tree crowns converging into a canopy overhead. Like breaks in the foliage, windows let in light from beyond the enclosure.”
From Forests, the Shadow of Civilisation by Robert Pogue Harrison