At the start of 2020, I made monoprints of several recently pollarded Lime Trees outside my old London flat, and then the whole street and then all the surrounding streets; I quickly recognized that London’s street trees were something of a multi-valent representation of so many things we widely don’t know about ecology.

I then moved into the nearby parks and woodlands of East London to record stressed, dead or dying trees. Once I moved to Devon, I printed local trees that had been introduced into the ecosystem (Monterrey Pines.); those affected by similarly transported deadly pathogens (sudden Oak death in Ojai/California and Ash dieback here in the UK.); the victims of deadly wildfires (Joshua Trees in the Mojave National Preserve.) and those that are managed by us (eg. by the Woodland Trust in my Avon Valley Woods prints.) and the keystone species (eg. Beavers in my 'Little Punks' series.) that will be vital to nature's recovery.

Nearly all of my Tree Portraits are composite gelliplate monoprints, with varying degrees of layering, employing hand-cut stencils and masking fluid for the larger pieces. I came across gelliplates quite by accident through my 2018 Great Art materials prize, & instantly found a superb way of translating ideas the moment they came to mind. I try to recreate a sense of place and/or a feeling of unique identity regarding each tree, which I feel is reinforced by using monoprint. I am now considered to be the leading practitioner of this medium in the UK, and I now have a technical article published in the 2024 Summer edition of Printmaking Today.

The Tree Portraits have won numerous awards and been published in numerous arts magazines in recent years. 15 of the series were acquired by the Jyväskylä Art Museum following their appearance at the 16th Creativa Graphica in 2022, and are also present in private collections in the UK, USA & Europe.

Archival prints and originals from the series have raised well over £4,000 for both the Woodland Trust & Rewilding Britain, and will also feature in a fundraiser for the Joshua Tree replanting program in the Mojave National Preserve later this year. There are now well over 350 prints in this series.

'No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible ' - Richard Powers, The Overstory (p. 423).