Jelly Green

Artist Statement

I have always been drawn to the natural world, especially areas where trees have been left to thrive.

There is a sense of stepping into another world, another story when walking into a woodland: they are places of great mystery, bursting with a vibrancy and life that feeds the imagination.

As a child, I spent long periods of time in a native British woodland on my Grandparents farm in Suffolk. Over the course of the year I would watch the leaves change colour: the vivid green canopy of oaks, ashes and hornbeams in the summer months gradually fading away as the autumn approached, until all that was left were the bones of the trees, brittle against a grey sky. The melancholy of winter then giving way to hope as tree buds begin to unfurl in the spring. Trees and woodlands are markers, especially in the northern hemisphere. They mark time and place, something that I try to reflect in my work.

When beginning a new painting I usually start by making several charcoal drawings and smaller oil or watercolour paintings with the subject in front of me. I then take these studies back to my studio to work from for a larger canvas. For me, working from life is so important, there’s a real sense of immediacy when painting outside. Landscapes change enormously throughout a day, one minute it can be wonderfully bright and suddenly completely darkened by a passing cloud. This can be very frustrating but also very freeing, I feel it keeps the paint fresh and hopefully gives the painting a sense of movement.

I have spent a great part of the last five years dedicated to painting forests around the world which has been a fairly bittersweet adventure. I lived in the rainforest in Brazil for the first time in 2015 and nothing could have prepared me for the explosion of colour and sound on my arrival. The denseness of light and dark, the sheer scale of the trees, was both breathtaking and humbling, and inevitably, hugely inspiring for my work. It is difficult to conjure that sense of ‘being' - of living and working in such an enormous ‘organism’ that sustains so much life. Each tree is an entire world in its own right, its trunk and limbs home to monkeys, bats, spiders, sloths, moths and parrots. Rainforests are undoubtably some of the most majestic places on earth, but perhaps more importantly they are one of the Earth’s primary carbon sinks, which are areas that absorb more carbon than they release, and yet we are now clearing thousands of acres of forests worldwide every hour by chainsaws, bulldozers and fire. At the current rate there will be none left by the end of this century. Deforestation not only harms the wildlife, plants and indigenous people who live within it but also creates soil erosion, water pollution, air pollution and increases the risk from global warming enormously.

This year alone over 13 million hectares of the world's forests have been lost.