Bob Stone

Trees of South East London

Set of 3. Acrylic on Paper, 594 x 841 mm, 2020.

It was only whilst painting the extraordinary convoluted and upside down London plane tree in St Giles’ graveyard that I was reminded of Titian’s marvellously visceral, late masterpiece - ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’. I saw it nearly forty years ago in at an exhibition at the Royal Academy. Intuition and memory work as connections, memory has been strangely fluid in the time of Covid.

Likewise the little lake at Belair Park, with the overhanging chestnut tree has resonances for me. The peculiarly dark, reflective waters are like a black mirror inverting the world. I think of Cezanne’s painting of Lake Annecy in the Courtauld Collection and that our world has been turned upside down.