Painting trees.

I have been playing with the idea of working further with trees, i have already produced work to hang on trees and played about with the different textures of the branches, trees against the fabric and colourful decorative and busy shapes withing my pieces of work. But i want to connect more with the trees, and find a more satisfying way of dealing with combining my work into the forest, and make it feel more natural and less fixed and static.

Considering painting the actual trees has crossed my mind, mind you, I'm sure if there are any rules against this sort of activity, but i have come across some examples of when this has been successful. Some examples were taken at Transylvania's street festival, part of Leonardo DA Vinci UK artist exchange scheme. Although the tree's here are not painted in much detail, more of a decorative pattern, similar to the colours and shapes withing my tree-banner pieces. It's still effective despite there not being much going on, only stripes of colour.Combined, and with the natural surroundings, it does the painting justice and its succeed as a piece and somehow looks natural within the landscape.

This painting has concentrated more on an actual image, rather that crating a colourful scene. I like the way it's small, so makes you have to make the effort to go up-close to the tree to appreciate the painting, and also how the painter has made use of a small crack in the tree as the outline of the beginning and end of the work.

I have also been trying to get images of faces to react with the surfaces of the trees, i dealt with this by mono printing the faces, so it was a simple, sketchy linear line, colliding against the crazy shapes of what you can consider to represent hair/thoughts of the 'person'. This did work in a sense, but i felt the images of the faces needed to be stronger, achieving this may mean attempting to try again with a different media..maybe sewing the face or painting it so its more of a stronger image, rather that it fade away among everything else that's going on around it.

I do think the colours i choose do work well with the rough, brown tree skin, but as i work in delicate detail with my stitching, it sometimes seam's like there's too much distraction away from the effort that's been put into the little things that you may not notice looking from far. Maybe i like the idea of having to make an effort to look harder rather than take it for what it is in the first glance. I also like the contrast not only between the colours , but more obvious, between the straight line's of the tall trees and the curly, busy all over the place shapes that seem to run against the natural pattern of everything of its surroundings. I will continue to work like this, and look more into the rule book about painting and decorating trees.....!