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Reading Edward Thomas’s poetry inspired two series of drawings and paintings set in the Sussex woodlands where we spent several summers. The architectural and atmospheric setting of the forestry echoed many of my then urban interests. Light filtering through the canopy creates spaces that are crowded with forms but open into deep pathways of narrow perspective. The shadows allow for a huge range of fugitive colours and contrasting brilliance. The woodland is still but full of sound and small movements.

During the summer of 1996, overjoyed by the birth of our son, I made a set of 10 chalk drawings of a single oak tree on Hampstead Heath. I wanted to move away from the complex urban imagery I had been working with and create a single iconic natural form, by repeatedly drawing the same motif in different hues and lights, as if it were a portrait of a friend, capturing the various sides of their personality.

This oak was then the subject of an extensive run of monotypes in monochrome and as large multi-plate colour woodcuts. The anthropomorphic, head-like form evolved into a suite of surreal paintings. The Sound of the Trees, the collective title for this body of work, was shown at Six Chapel Row Gallery, Bath.

When I was commissioned to paint Chelmsford Cathedral’s Tree of life in 2003 the Hampstead Heath oak remerged as its prototype.