Overview

It was an exercise to learn how to see, to understand just one thing in its greatest detail. Stephen Taylor came across the 250-year-old tree while on a walk in Essex, England, six years ago, shortly after the deaths of his mother and close friend a tragic time that brought him back to painting and then to an obsession with realism and colour perception. He painted the same oak scores of times over a period of three years, in extremes of weather and light, at all times of day and night. Oak is nature's creed of endurance (the tree was standing when Jane Austen was just a baby) and of one man's promise to find beauty in a painful world.

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9781616890322

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Some books show you how to laugh, some show you how to think, but, every once a while, one will show you how to live. The exquisite Oak: One Tree, Three Years, and Fifty Paintings follows of the story of artist Stephen Taylor who decided to paint the same oak tree in the English countryside every day for three years.... As the oak changes by the month or hour, the surrounding environment changes.... A singular plant becomes a talisman for the passage of time and seasons--and you, as viewer--begin to change too, becoming more observant and aware of the tiny yet enormous natural transformations that take place each day and minute. Seeing--in the truest sense--is the lesson here, one that's taught with such elegance that you'll be bewitched into stopping and contemplating the birch or maple in your own yard that's serving--as T.S. Elliot once described trees--as 'the still point of the turning world.' --Oprah.com

Author Information

Stephen Taylor studied Fine Art at Leeds University with T.J. Clark and was taught observational painting by Paul Gopal Choudhury, with subsidiaries in Philosophy and Theology. He then studied perception and technique in John Constable as a post graduate at Essex University and visiting student at Yale.

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