We shook hands and introduced ourselves in a grassy car park at the National Trust’s Calke Abbey in the south of Derbyshire.
Author Rob Penn was curious to find out how an artist like me sees trees and I was eager to meet a writer who has a deep affinity with them. I loved his book about the ash, ‘The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees’, and wanted to hear more about his current project.
When we spoke prior to meeting in person, Rob expressed an interest in not just looking at, but also drawing the trees, so I’d come with an extra sketchbook for him. We set off into the woods.
Rob is currently working on his eighth book about the biology, history, culture and stories of an imagined 1000-year-old oak.
‘Right now, I am writing the biography of a thousand-year-old oak tree. I want to consider how these trees have nurtured us, culturally and socially, when forty generations of humans have passed under them.
I will visit ten oaks of this age across Britain, in the company of people with expertise in diverse fields from ecology and biology to epigenetics and bio-sonification, people who are able to illuminate the momentousness of the trees for me and the reader.‘
He’d chosen this particular location because of one outstanding oak, known as the Old Man of Calke, though we were spoilt for choice as we moved through the old deer park and its many ancients. It’s impossible to know its age with certainty, but the ancient form and features, along with the landscape history would suggest it’s been there for over a millennium.
I could see that the pressure of drawing alongside an artist was creating a little tension so suggested we stop at a younger, less intimidating example of wood pasture oak and begin to draw.
I tried to help him shift into a drawing frame of mind by articulating what I’m looking for as I begin to draw. We tuned in to the way the tree has moved through space and time, the twists and arcs, furrows and grooves, which all point to its growth and history and also hint where we might put our lines to describe it.
The inner critic is a familiar presence to artists and writers alike, so I reassured him that these kinds of drawings are the equivalent of notes, a rough record of a first conversation and not to be judged by any aesthetic criteria other than whether it is a true response to what you observed and felt in the moment.
As we wandered closer to the Old Man itself, we swapped stories of childhood trees, raising children, finding solace in the woods and the art of bread making, with Rob recording our conversation on his little dictaphone.
And then there it was. Arriving at the Old Man felt like stepping backwards in time. We were suddenly in the company of an oak unlike any other I’ve met, a great, convoluted wall of wood topped with strangely skinny, angular branches. The central portion was a deep hollow containing decaying wood and its accompanying tiny lives. At either end of the wall were bark-covered buttresses supporting the shards of upper limbs.
After some coffee we settled into an attempt at drawing the tree, but it was very hard to know where to start.
Charcoal powder seemed like a good idea so I introduced Rob to a finger drawing technique as an accessible way into it – essentially just dipping your digits into the powder and pushing it around until the shapes emerge.
I realise now that it felt almost rudely hasty to draw it after only a brief introduction. If we’d more more time I would have sat with it for a lot longer, just taking in its immense complexity before opening the sketchbook.
I came away feeling I’d need at least four days drawing to begin to understand this tree, or to even narrow down which aspects to study further. However it was so good to share this experience of ‘ancient-oak-overwhelm’ with someone who really understood the power and presence of such a tree, and to share our different ways of seeing it.
Find out more about Rob’s work here.