So autumn has come again, with her blushing and animating hand, searing and spotting, tinting and flaming, making hectic and encrimsoning, concealing decay, death and coming annihilation behind a mesmerising anarchy of colour. I have been out painting, down in Somerset, trying to get down on my oblongs of Whatman the blazing furnaces of reds, yellows and golds in my garden, beyond it and beyond the place where the indigenous fowl — geese, ducks and chickens mostly — fend off the rooks which raid their food from the darkening sky, a line of gilded birches glitter fantastical against the dark green fields. Autumn does not last: there is one perfect day when the entire chromatic symphony strikes a note of angelic harmony, with the sky a perfect eggshell blue if you are lucky, and you must grab that one day and paint furiously before the winds strike a hideous discord and blow away the enchantment.
The more I age, the more I like and respect trees, which grow old gracefully and acquire the wisdom which eludes us — me anyway. As the winds come, they spread their branches with the confidence born of many winters of survival, and dig their roots deeper into the soil. They do not mind losing the leaves, mere outer garments, as ephemeral as the Paris fashions when great masters like Dior and Balenciaga manipulated them with dismissive insolence. The leaves are the mere dividends of the seasons, sprouting from the permanent capital of wood and pulp, the inner guard and unguents beneath the bark, itself inviolable against the weather and protecting all within. It is good to draw trees when they are losing or have lost their leaves — bare ruin’d choirs, as Shakespeare says — for then their wooden architecture stands out naked in all its relentless logic and system, infinitely complex yet also massively simple, like the majestic columns and arches of Exeter, whose interior is the finest and warmest of any mediaeval cathedral — the Sistine Chapel of Gothic.
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