Reposted from CRANN Magazine
It took me some time to realise that actually I had been painting trees all my life. It wasn’t until 2015 that I consciously chose to call my genre ‘treescapes’
When I look back over my life as an artist, trees have always been in the frame. The beauty about painting trees is that I always have subject matter. I only have to roam and this country will offer up the most wonderful variety. It is also personally the best possible way to experience the seasons; through trees.
The woodland has always been a magical place for me. As a child, I grew up surrounded by forest. A jump over the garden fence, one field and I would be happily dragging my feet through the dead leaves and climbing an old oak tree for a better view.
Trees have been my haven for all things: play, re-balancing and inspiration. When I paint them now I am always looking to paint the earthy magic I feel when I am wandering around in Nature.
Debbie Baxter write about her life as a full time creative
Wonderfully, this passion is not an isolated affair. In 2018, a friendly BBC researcher contacted me and asked if I would be happy to do a short piece on my work for Countryfile. I took the producer for a walk around a beautiful local estate near where I live called Wandlebury.
“Let me paint for you a ‘treescape’ here,” I said and those six minutes of film footage allowed me to show the UK my paintings and find others that shared my passion. It also helped me then to go on and create an exciting relationship with Wandlebury and the charity that looks after this estate called Past Present and Future. Wandlebury is an oasis of tree varieties in a dessert of agriculture in Cambridge. This is my go-to place to sit, draw, walk and breath fresh air. Shortly I will be running open-air painting classes, with a talk about my journey through trees and a solo exhibition at the end of the summer in the grounds here.
However, in order to keep my creative juices flowing, I really like to travel. Earlier in the year I took myself to South Devon and sough out the most magnificent moss-covered oaks that surrounded the Dart river and its tributaries. I will now be painting these for the upcoming exhibition at the end of August 2019.
Building a relationship with Nature and its flora means a lot to me. I wanted to find a way to express this, not just through panting, so with the help of a poet, we gacve created a coffee-table book with over 40 paintings and poems that really celebrate this unusual love affair I have with trees. This will be published at the end of April.
I think the unique thing about being a treescape artist is that the ‘Trees’ have been my creative teacher from thr word go. They have single-handedly taught me how to paint, how to live and how to be creative. Interesting because not once have they ever said one word!
