trees in winter

Our Making Light project is all about celebrating the specificity of winter, and today I want to draw your attention to a creative man whose work is focused on just that: Richard Shimell.

I confess I’m a bit of a Richard Shimell superfan: I’ve admired his work for many years, and one of his gorgeous original prints hangs here, on my wall. In one sense, what Richard does is all about the long process – which brings together the painstaking labour of precise, tiny cuts in vinyl flooring with the magic of ink and rollers. But his work also speaks very powerfully of an always-open creative eye, arrested by objects and scenes whose distinctive beauty is often overlooked. One reason I love Richard’s work so much, then, is because he is so palpably artist and artisan, mind and hand, seer and maker.

Richard celebrates winter, a season which offers us all a way of seeing that is unavailable at any other time of year. Only now, in this light, can we see this hawthorn, in this way

or this oak.

When I look at Richard’s work, I feel I am looking through the eyes of someone who truly possesses Wallace Stevens’ mind of winter.

. . .the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is

Stevens’ Snow Man is a tricksy poem, and you might sit with its koan-like paradoxes for a long time (a lifetime?). Richard’s work is doing just this, perhaps, as it forms a beautiful something from winter’s no-thing, and creates a vital presence out of apparent absence.

Yet Richard’s work is not a zen abstraction, nor is it in any sense a representation of “wild” nature. One of the things I love most about his landscapes, in fact, is their very obviously human quality. His trees sit in inhabited, cultivated spaces: ploughed fields, planted hedgerows, thoroughfares along which animals, walkers, and vehicles move.

I enjoy the way that this tree that fills the sky also frames a lived-in place . . .

. . . and that that this beech, which speaks so eloquently to us, sits alongside a telegraph pole, and its different medium of communication.

There’s an honesty, I think, in the way Richard reveals his winter landscapes as the made-places that they are. His winter trees are always resiliently themselves, then, but they are somehow always us as well. I’m sure that many of you have, as I do, a special tree with which you identify: perhaps as a symbol of strength or struggle, perhaps as a marker of the place in which you feel most at home.

I have always found the humanity of Richard’s work very moving – a feeling only compounded by reading his recently published book.

This is not only a book about the distinctive beauty of winter landscapes, but about the joy of walking in all weathers, about the resilience of things both natural and human, and the restorative, reparative effects of creative work. I know you’ll love it, and very highly recommend it.

You can also hear Richard talking speaking about his work in this recent episode of Ramblings, and find out more at his website.