'The Dream of a Golden Tree' — Oil, Cold Wax and Bitumen

This work represents something of a departure. It is a graphic rendering of a winter tree, with a pronounced emphasis on drawing and linear qualities — a shift from the more atmospheric landscape work that typically occupies my practice. The painting uses oil, cold wax, bitumen, pumice stone powder, and enamel on an 80 × 80 cm canvas.

'The Dream of a Golden Tree' Oil, Cold Wax, bitumen, pumice stone, enamel on 80 x 80 cm Canvas

Materials and Process

The general process is relatively organic. The first layers are applied with a brayer using a compound of cold wax, pumice stone powder, and enamel paint. A scoring technique — not unlike the etching process — is then used to create a rich patina and fine surface texture.

Gold enamel has been alternately trailed, poured, painted, and spattered across the surface, followed by thin washes of diluted bitumen. At intervals, the top layers have been partially erased and reinstated using rags soaked in a mixture of turpentine and linseed oil.

A heat gun has accelerated the drying stages and simultaneously generated unexpected forms as the enamel melts into the wax. A sander partially obliterates the upper layers, revealing the patina of earlier stages — an effect that echoes erosion and the passage of time.

The Dream of a Golden Tree (Display setting)

The Dream of a Golden Tree (Detail)

Spontaneity and the Limits of Control

An aspiration I return to often in painting is the idea of producing a work that appears to have created itself. To achieve a degree of genuine spontaneity, it is necessary to paint without excessive control — to deliberately limit one's awareness of what is happening and to embrace chance as a working principle.

Absolute control is a mirage. It tends to produce restricted and stifled outcomes. This is one reason I use unconventional tools and materials: they do not automatically respond to dexterity or fine motor activity. They have their own logic, and working with that logic — rather than against it — is where the most interesting results tend to emerge.

The Dream of a Golden Tree (Detail)

Inspiration from Laura Simms

The title of this work draws on the storytelling tradition explored by Laura Simms, whose work engages with the symbolic and mythological dimensions of trees as thresholds between worlds. The golden tree in this painting is not a literal subject but a presence — something between memory and archetype, between the visible and the imagined.

The tree as a motif has recurred throughout my work, and here it takes on a more concentrated, almost emblematic quality. The linear structure of the bare winter branches, set against the layered and eroded surface, creates a tension between the drawn and the painted that I find productive and unresolved.