I began to have an interest in landscape art and depicting trees, after seeing paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael and Salvatore Rosa at the National Gallery as a student.
The landscape paintings of the 17 th century seemed to me to represent the art of the beginning of modern times, when the influence of religion in Europe began to wane and an existential enquiry into our relationship to the natural world became the crucial subject of art, and when the spiritual aspect of the presence of nature again took precedence.
The link between these ideas and their affinity with early pagan myths and folklore, often focused on trees and the culture of the woodland grove, became increasingly an area for artistic study in the Baroque period and particularly at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with the rise of Romanticism as a movement in painting.
In my own work the relationship between Romantic landscape painting and the landscape paintings of the Far East became a stylistic influence, and drawing and painting trees crucial to understanding the ideas of conceptual artists such as Joseph Beuys where landscape art embodies the spirit of nature.
As Aleghiro e Boetti said, Art for the Collective Psyche of Nature.