Fiona McIntyre

TELEGRAPH 11th Jan 2015 - Bristol celebrates art of the tree

"To kick off Bristol’s year as the European Green Capital, a gallery has been transformed

into a magical arboretum

...The city’s oldest gallery, the RWA, has been transformed into a colourful arboretum for an exhibition by a newly formed group of artists. Rows of trees in works by a group of 30 British painters, printmakers and sculptors line the bright Victorian rooms at the Royal West of England Academy. Despite stylistic differences, they, like most British landscapists from John Constable to David Hockney, love trees and return to the subject again and again. Thus they’ve given themselves the tongue-in-cheek name the Arborealists.

Trees have played an important part in British art since the Romantics first put them centrecanvas. Constable drew and painted them as singular subjects, like portraits, even talking of the “young lady” ash tree on Hampstead Heath; Henry Moore used to play at naming tree species from a distance; Paul Nash said: “I love and worship trees and believe they are people”; Hockney talked of the “spatial thrill” of trees – anyone who saw his Royal Academy exhibition in 2012 will know exactly what he was on about.

Some artists have sought a similar effect at Arboretum. There are vibrant plein air works filledwith life and optimism, such as Greenish Deep, in which Fiona McIntyre’s gnarled willows break through the picture frame and bounce off reflecting water. But since the show follows the recent alarm over the spread of ash dieback and other tree diseases, Arboretum is, overall, a melancholy contemplation of the state of man’s current relationship with trees"...

by Florence Waters - writer for the Telegraph

31st Jan 2015 

Saturday Times Review - 'Exhibition Critics Would Pay To See' - featuring 'Greening Deep'.

Times What's On - review of Arboreal by Rachel Campbell Johnson