Kenneth Armitage

Description

In the early 1980s Kenneth Armitage took to studying the oak trees in Richmond Park. Fascinated by his subject, he would visit the park weekly, observing the trees through the changes of light, weather and season for a period of ten years. Furthermore, he studied everything he could find in libraries about the English oak and its usage. He made countless drawings, etchings, maquettes and sculptures to his chosen theme, with Richmond Oak coming towards the end of this period of intense preoccupation in a culmination of effort, passion and observation. Armitage was obsessed with the subject and gradually realised that he seemed to be unique in his massive response to the oak tree. The forms of oak trees are undeniably sculptural - strong, solid shapes, akin to those he reveals in his work with the human figure. Gesture, an essential component in his studies of the figure, was also to be found in these trees - differently, according to the season: most eloquent in winter, in summer tempered by leaves.

In Richmond Oak, what appears to be a park bench encircling the tree trunk began as a circlet of leafy growth and gradually evolved into a seat as Armitage worked the plaster model prior to casting. His rendering of leafy clumps on the top branches is a reflection of the way leaves cluster between the height of summer and the autumn to make masses where light fails to penetrate. In a catalogue for an exhibition in Japan of his oak tree sculptures, drawings and prints, Armitage wrote: 'I like best the late summer when, presumably due to drying and shrinking, the leaves separate into heavy definable clusters; otherwise on certain winter days with a white low mist and each black tree standing free in space isolated and awesome, still, with limbs in frozen gestures.'