Blue Door Press

Bare winter trees have fascinated me since childhood. Until recently, I would have said it was down to their beauty, to the pleasure of watching empty branches sketched against a winter blue sky or for the enjoyment of seeing the structure of things, a complexity made visible.

It took an iPad painting by David Hockney to reveal a further, surprising reason why trees have held my attention for decades.

*

I’m eight and beginning to understand that the world is a ball, spinning at a rate I can’t imagine. If it slows down we all fall off into outer space.

In my Church of England primary school the windows are high. Church-like. Looking up, I notice clouds moving against the sky and take this to be evidence of Earth slowing down. I daren’t tell the teacher – what words would I say? I make a plan. I will hold tight to one of the trees that grow in the playground. They are fixed to the spinning ball.  

Perhaps I soon realised my fear of flying off the planet was unfounded but memories of gazing up through that classroom’s high windows remain vivid. Soon, my attention shifted from clouds to the trees in their bare winter state.

There I am, bored by multiplication, finding it compelling and mysterious to study the way one branch, then another, divides and divides down to the finest twigs. I could have watched trees all day but for Miss Warburton nudging my attention back to the squared pages of my arithmetic book.

Later, at Grammar school, we had an inspirational art teacher, Mr Lofthouse – a real artist – who dressed casually and had a beard. In the Sixties, this was radical in a traditional Grammar school. Keen on abstraction, Mr Lofthouse encouraged us to study natural forms and to take our cue from these to make pictures that spoke of the world and how we felt about it, but not literally. How thrilling to discover it was possible to say things without using words.

I’m fourteen, about to start the end-of-year art exam. I turn over the paper to find several topics but couldn’t say now what the others were because as soon as I saw the words WINTER TREES, I was off. At ease, mixing shades of grey, creating with a few brush strokes a winding path to recede across the page, implying a sense of depth. Soon I’m not thinking how to do it, I’m lost in the flow, excited, urgently making marks to suggest a trunk, main branches and the pattern of finer and finer twigs.

Mr Lofthouse gives me a mark of 90%. He frames the piece and hangs it on the wall of the school hall. This is unusual, and a touch controversial. Not many people in this academic institution are as impressed as Mr Lofthouse and certainly not my parents. Art is a pastime not a serious subject. Why hadn’t I got 90% in History or Maths? For my parents, anxious, fearful people, my interest in art is disturbing. ‘I don’t know where she gets that from,’ they said as if I had a disease. I don’t know either. Perhaps it’s from my mother’s side? Perhaps she comes from a long line of artists? But she won’t reveal where she came from. We don’t know if she has any extended family. The fear in her eyes at the mention of relatives makes it clear we mustn’t ask.

*

Since my mother died, aged 96, I’ve been researching and writing the story of her hidden past, a story I’ve needed all my life. Just when I feel I’m reaching the end of the memoir, my perception of my mother, her mystery and my view of it, starts to shift again. This happened recently while gazing at a postcard of an iPad painting by David Hockney. I’d seen the original in the 2021 exhibition, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, at the Royal Academy. The exhibition was hung chronologically to give the viewer the experience of spring emerging. The piece titled, No 97, 5 March, 2020, alandscape of bare trees, lit by a full moon, was in the first room.

As other visitors hurry towards colourful works filled with blossoms and sharp greens, it’s in that first room that I linger, returning to it several times. This painting, for me, holds a charge. I want to lift it off the wall, to own it.

Instead, I make do with the postcard which sits on the mantelpiece in my workroom along with other postcards of Hockney’s winter tree paintings. But with this latest one, I find myself often stopping to enjoy the bands of colour suggesting a landscape at night. A translucent blue, stippled by lighter patches suggesting thin cloud, forms the sky. To the left, a circle of bright white depicts a full moon. Below the sky, a darker, thinner band of a solid bluish-grey forms a hill and in the foreground a band of green evokes a field, hatched with tiny touches of white along its edge where the moonlight falls.

Against the bands of colour, Hockney deftly sketches several bare trees. In the centre foreground a single large tree dominates, its branches reach up and inwards. To the right of the field and further back, so it seems smaller, is another lone tree. This one has branches that reach outwards.

As I study the relationship between the two trees I find myself thinking of the large one as my mother – fiercely independent, closing in on herself. The smaller tree, with the branches opening out, reminds me of myself, always reaching but getting no closer. Fanciful as that may sound, to me it feels right. Here is a representation of the years of longing to know what lay behind my mother’s secrecy.

The idea takes further shape as I focus on the rows of trees on the hill in the background. Those far off in the distance to the right suggest ancestors, long dead, but whose stories I’ve been colleting from the living relatives recently discovered. Could those people be represented by the group of trees to the left of the scene, under the moon and closer in? No wonder the painting felt charged. It encapsulates the mystery I have grown up with, the situation before I had words for it. Bare trees. A bare family tree.

Of course, what we notice, what snags our attention in the outside world, will have a connection to our inner world. As Hockney says, ‘we see psychologically.’ And hadn’t Mr Lofthouse taught me that years ago? The painting I made as an inquisitive fourteen-year-old no doubt said much about my state of mind at the time.

Thinking again about my eight-year-old self – perhaps those scudding clouds, my fear of falling into outer space, also had something to do with feeling unrooted, untethered. At least I could hold onto the trees. Bare trees offered somewhere tangible, to direct my curiosity for the intangible.

My new reading of Hockney’s painting is a reminder to look again at a work of art that won’t let you go – what might it be trying to say?

After the bleak winter of not knowing, my mother’s family tree is starting to reveal buds; the deep, wordless winter now edging towards the arrival of a kind of spring. As Hockney notes in the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘… to show the full arrival of spring you have to start in winter …’

Pamela Johnson March 2023