Mark Frith: A Legacy of Ancient Oaks

In March 1470 the Battle of Nibley Green was fought near the village of North Nibley in Gloucestershire, England, over a land title dispute. It was notable for being the last battle on English soil between private armies of feudal noblemen. Thomas Talbot, 2nd Viscount Lisle, was defeated by William Berkeley, 2nd Baron Berkeley, and was killed.

There are no reliable contemporary accounts of the battle but it appears likely that Berkeley’s men mustered in the shelter of the “Mickle Wood”, the surviving remnant of which is now known as Michaelwood, before facing a charge from Lisle’s squadron. As they left the shelter of the wood they may have passed a boundary oak, about 150 years old.

Almost 500 years later a young boy called Mark Frith, who lived nearby, would play in the hollowed out trunk of that tree. Later he would write of the Great Oak at Nibley Green, that it was a “fantastical giant, impossibly old, a treasure trove filled with wonder enough to overflow my young imagination. Inside and out, up and down, in the company of jackdaws, foxes, mice, barn owls, beetles and bats I explored bark, bough, twig, leaf, acorn and the mouldering cavernous interior of that ancient tree.”

That young boy would go on to study fine art before pursuing a career as an award winning film maker. In 2011, having moved back to the family home in Gloucestershire, he renewed his relationship with the Great Oak, and felt compelled to draw it. As he started he experienced a curious sensation of feeling the texture of the twigs and smelling the bark—and almost of the tree drawing itself. The visceral memories that he had acquired as a boy were now informing and directing this act of creation.

After two months’ work the enormous drawing (about one and a half meters or five feet square) was complete and Mark began to consider what to do next. His research led him to Jacob Strutt, who had toured England in the 1820s, compiling a portrait series of ancient oaks. He resolved to do essentially the same thing, recording in minute detail as many as he could of the ancient oaks that still survived. He realized that this would take years and would require some significant financial support. He would need a patron, and he found him, in the person of Felix Dennis, a tree lover of considerable means and a colorful character. A meeting, followed by a fairly liquid lunch, elicited the required generous patronage, and Mark could begin to travel the country, meeting with landowners, and gaining their consent to having their tree drawn.

The result, four years later, was a series of twenty oak portraits, each as large and as detailed as the original of the Great Oak at Nibley Green. Each is drawn with soft graphite pencil on Fabriano paper, stretched on a board. They are all winter portraits because only when the tree is not in leaf can the “full muscularity” of its boughs be fully appreciated.

The hauntingly beautiful images convey an understanding of the fractal nature of the branching pattern of an oak’s canopy: they are coherent both when viewed at a distance and in extreme close-up, when the rendering of intense detail reveals the buds at the end of each shoot. That is one distinction between Mark’s body of work and that of his predecessors such as Strutt: another is that in Mark’s work the tree is freed from its background and presented almost as a deliberately two-dimensional icon-like image.

The Chaceley Oak, located on the floodplain of the River Severn, is unique in the series in being dead. England probably has more ancient oaks than any other country—certainly more than any other European country. Yet the Chaceley oak is a reminder to us that they are mortal and we may be one of the last generations to have had the privilege of witnessing them. Frequent and intense flooding of the Severn in recent years, almost certainly as a result of climate change, may have hastened the tree’s demise, along with ploughing of the field in which it stands. One other tree, the Pontfadog Oak in Wales, blew down and was destroyed after Mark drew it. These harsh facts give another dimension to the series of drawings, as memorial records.

In accordance with Felix Dennis’s wishes, 10 of these portraits are to be held by the Heart of England Forest, a woodland creation project that he established and funded, and 10 by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Sadly none of them are currently on public exhibition but they can be viewed here and there is a book, A Legacy of Ancient Oaks, available from Amazon and Waterstones.

How to sum up the impression that these drawings create? In Mark Frith’s own words: “I hope that in some modest way these drawings express man’s profound relationship with the natural world, and, if it has one, something of the soul of the ancient oak tree”. Well said.