Gold is an interesting material. Its chemically inactive which means that it wont fade or tarnish over time. That makes it very stable and very permanent. Fixed. It’s part of why its used to convey power on Cathedrals or palaces or monuments. But at the same time it offers something few other materials do: movement. Gold makes a inanimate object feel alive when light dances off of its surface.
I’ve put this combination of permanence and movement at the centre of my new original Tree of Life piece. This work was made to hang at the centre of a new exhibition my art at the redeveloped Alba Cafe at Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington.
Spread out over the 7m long gallery wall are seven works of mine. A mixture of limited edition prints and original pieces like this new Tree of Life hang below a long skylight above the built in bench seating. I’ve even designed them a mug to use in the cafe. So you can sit back and enjoy the display while you sip a tea from one of these ‘PARK’ mugs.
I’m not expecting this display to stay as fixed as the gold though. All of the work is available to buy direct from my website as usual. Alongside the new Tree of Life, there is my glass, steel and gold piece ‘HI’ from 2022 and an original A1 painting ‘Make It Rain’ from the My Type On Paper show. If any of them sell I’ve got a gap to fill and an exhibition to reconfigure.
Stock is also running low on the limited edition prints on display. There are just two ‘WOW’ 3rd editions left, three Test Card F’s, four gold ‘Fail We May, Sail We Must’ and five ‘Just the Two of Us’ prints.
Completing the five, four, three, two, one I discovered that I had one ‘RUN II’ print left. I thought they had all sold but then number 30 of 30 was pulled out of my plans chest when I was looking for something else. Its online now, along with a special one -off mono print version of that edition. There are only one of each, so move fast.
How To Grow 23.5 Carat Gold Trees
Let’s talk a little more now about this new Tree of Life piece, dig into to its inspirations and explore its technical labours.
The first gold Tree of Life I created sits just to my right as I write this from the desk of The Frankenshed. It was painted as a memorial to the giant Fig tree that once dominated the garden.
That fig tree was a menace. In late summer huge overripe figs that were well out of my reach used to fall like bombs from its branches, landing with big sugary splats on the old concrete slabs that the flies would then swarm around. By Autumn leaves the width of an adult man’s hand dropped in their hundreds. Together with the fallen fruit and a little rain the decomposing leaves created a blanket of figgy slurry that was disgusting. This slurry filled the little gap between the back of the shed and wall and began to rot the entire floor of of the shed. That rotten shed was the ‘dead body’ that was resurrected to become award winning Frankenshed we all know and love today.
Not content with killing the shed the fig tree had become so oversized that its roots were ripping up the pavement and knocking over the solid brick boundary wall for the second time. So, sadly, it had to be cut down. I do miss the figs though, and the ability to sling my hammock between its trunk and the old security gate. But once its reign of terror was over the extra light and space made the garden feel undeniably better than before.
But I don’t take the felling of a tree lightly. He might have been a bolshy bruiser but we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. That tree would have been home to a massive amount of insect and wildlife. So in honour of its sacrifice I decided to immortalise it in gold leaf on the gable end of the newly revived Frankenshed.
By that point in the interior renovation of The Frankenshed things were starting to take longer than they should have. My actual work was getting impacted pretty badly by what was at this point still a big indulgence artistically and I had a new born baby and mother to look after as well. I needed to keep this tree memorial simple and get it done. So I gave myself just two days to complete it.
There’s something very nice about drawing a Tree of Life compared to trying to draw an accurate representation of a tree. When I try and draw a real tree from life my brain just goes into shutdown at the amount of branching, leaves and detail involved. I can’t really hack it. But a Tree of Life design is meant to be fantastical. This is art not botany. The focus for the artist crafting one of these designs is on managing negative space and shape. Which is also exactly how you create a balanced piece of lettering. Once again the sign painting skills cross over.
This Persian Tree of Life is one of my favourite examples. As you can see the artist has followed no rules about botanical reality but they have been strictly balanced in their use of negative space. Leaves, flowers and birds all shift and change shape to fill any awkward gaps in the unfurling design so that there are no big areas of that creamy background colour that would draw the eye away from exploring all of the different pops of colour and detail. This curving elegance was what I wanted to imitate.
The pitched roof of the gable end of the shed gave me a naturally rounded space for the tree to sit in, so then it was just a case of taking a line for the walk as Paul Klee used to say and filling it with branches and fig leaves. The sketch only took a couple of hours because I just allowed the tree’s structure to flow based on intuitive movements.
The rest of that first day was spent brushing in the 3-hour gold size, waiting for it to come up to tack and then pressing about £200 worth of 23.5 carat gold leaf into the slightly textured shiplap timber surface. Gold leaf is so thin that any surface texture at all will show up very noticeably. The gold wraps itself around even the tiniest ridge and then reflects the light off at a different angles. But I really like how it worked on the tree in the shed, the texture of the wood grain coming though on the trunk of the golden Tree of Life felt fitting.
Day two was less labour intensive. I loaded up my my size 1 Kafka Kwill brush with black One Shot paint and drifted its tip over the surface to add detail and an outline to the tree. Once the outlining was dry I moved on to the next phase of negative space management and hung all of my tools across its branches, taking care to make sure I had a balanced composition of both golden fig leaves and fold out saws. The result is one of my favourite pieces of work: The Tree of Life Tool Wall.
When I started work on this new golden Tree of Life piece I was once again tight for time. I had wanted to make something new for this exhibition opportunity at Abney Park Cafe by Sabel, but for a while the more negative voices in my head had won the battle and decided that I didn’t have the time or space to create a new original from scratch before the work needed to be hung. I could always just fill the space with a selection of prints and existing work, it would look great and no one would know the difference. Compelling arguments from the negative voices.
But then I checked back in with Toby and Lianna who run Sabel at Abney to see If I still needed to hang the work by the end of June in time for their start of July launch and they told me they were delaying their launch by a couple of weeks. These things always taker longer than you imagine to get up and running. Suddenly the forces within me that wanted something new turned the tide on the negative defenders of doing nothing. I had time now, no more excuses.
Still, once you factor in getting the panel delivered, priming it, undercoating, top coating, designing and actually executing the design there isn’t much time to play about. But as I discussed last week pressure usually does me some good.
We Be Burnishing
One gilding technique I wanted to develop with this new piece was directional burnishing. This is the process of using a scrap of velvet to lightly push the gold in one direction so that it bounces the light off at a different angel creating a dimensional effect. Its another technique from Sign Painting, where its used to make a flat painted letter appear carved and 3D, like this convex letter A below.
I’ve always been interested in taking these techniques in different directions, away from artful but ultimately still utilitarian sign making. Don’t get me wrong, I love trying to imitate the master craftsmen of the past but I’m not a revivalist. I will never live in their world, and they will never live in mine, so why try and pretend?
What I want to explore is using this technique of directional burnishing to give contour to more organic shapes than you find in lettering. Last year in a major commission that I still can’t completely show you I tried it with human figures. It was a big gamble, experimenting on hundreds of pounds of gold and days of effort leading up to that point, but it worked! I gave form to muscles and curves of the body using just a little square of green velvet.
Part of what defeated those negative voices preventing this new work from happening was the thought that I could build on that burnishing success. If I can contour stomach muscles on a body with velvet surely I could show the shape of a leaf or a trunk on a tree?
The key to a good directional burnish is in the surface preparation. It needs to be as smooth as possible for the effect to work. As I’ve already mentioned any ridge will be picked up and angle the gold away. That ridge could be left by a brushstroke or a tiny bobble of paint from a roller. Imperceptible to the naked eye but glaringly obvious once that 0.2 micron thin gold leaf goes down over it.
So that means lots of sanding. No one likes sanding. I used to always sand everything by hand and it would really flare up my RSI. Buying myself a Makita random orbit sander was life changing. Its still loud and dusty but its not doing me damage like it was before. In between each layer of primer, undercoat and topcoat I slap on a velcro 240 grit sanding pad and give it a pass over the entire 91cm x 91cm panel.
That all might sound quite tedious to the uninitiated. But once you’re into getting that perfect finish this sequential prep process becomes more and more satisfying. Every time I learn something new about refining my steps. This time, because I was rushing a little, I tried to put two coats of the blended enamel topcoat on in the same day. Big mistake. It was touch dry on the surface but underneath it was still wet. The sander pulled it up in big sticky flakes of fluroescent orange and lilac. I had to stop, reset, have a go at myself, forgive myself and then leave it overnight to redo in the morning. Lesson leant.
While that dried off I got to work on the sketch for the pattern. My daughter was sick that day, off nursery and in my care. I only had the time while she napped in the buggy to get the pattern done. Two hours, just like the one in the shed, were all that were needed when the pressure was on. I could spend days on that if I wanted. But it would lose the light and organic feel that I’m after. I wheeled her out of the studio while she was still groggy and left the the background to fully cure over night once more ready for game time tomorrow.
In the morning I transferred the pattern from the sketch to the panel using a graphite trace and learnt another lesson for next time. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to transfer a drawing: you rub a graphite stick over the back of the whole design, flip it over, position and then trace the outline with a pen or sharp pencil which presses a line of graphite off the back of the paper onto the surface and gives you a design. My mistake was to press a bit too hard with my pen which left a little indent in the cured paint. Any other material that wouldn’t matter in the slightest, but I knew the gold would sit in that tiny little valley and show it up. Frustrating but not terminal, that final outline with the brush would cover it.
The next challenge is to apply the gold size as evenly as possible while also allowing the brush to flow freely to form the shapes of the leaves and branches. That graphite trace is only a guide. I want the brush to form the organic curves of the tree in just a couple of strokes. That means moving in clean and confident sweeps rather than rigidly following an outline. It also means keeping a constant awareness of how thin or thick the size is becoming, adding tiny little dabs of white spirit to maintain a single cream like consistency until the whole design has been brushed in.
Now we wait. The Robertsons 3 hour gold size I use can take anywhere between 2-4 hours to come up to a ‘whistle tack’ as its known, i.e when you run your knuckle across it it makes a slight squeaky sound. Its summer, so this time it was closer to the two hour mark.
Finally, after days of prep and development its time to break out the gold and bring this piece to life. I’m using a 23.5 carat ‘extra thick’ transfer gold leaf, with a light press from Wrights of Lymm, its current cost is £36.78 per book of 25 leaves. I needed four books for this piece. Not cheap. If you’re going to be using the gold outdoors you get it pressed harder so it doesn’t all fly away as easily. A harder press dulls the gold slightly, up on a shop fascia you would never know or care, but in the studio these margins matter.
Surface gilding is like completing a constantly evolving puzzle. Each square of 80mm x 80mm gold is a piece and every time you press it into the size and pull the tissue paper away some is left on the sheet which creates a new puzzle piece shape of gold for you to fit somewhere else in the design. The more effective you are at solving each new puzzle the less gold you will waste. But the longer you take to solve each piece the more time you eat up while the tack is at the right level. Its a delicate balance between moving fast but not wastefully.
With the gild complete we have now arrived at what all of the delicate prep and care has been building up to: the burnish. I wrap my little square of velvet around a ball of cotton wool to give it something for me to grip onto and get down to making these golden leaves on my tree come to life. I reuse the squares of tissue paper that were once covered in gold to cut into curves to act as stencils for my burnish to work against, covering half the leaf with the tissue paper and pushing the exposed side of the gold away in one direction. When I peel away my tissue stencil that half of the leaf is bouncing light in another direction. A two-tone shape to the leaf has been achieved.
At this point in this piece, several hundred words in, I’m really missing the ability to pop little clips from my phone in here to demonstrate what I’m talking about. Part of the challenge in developing this writing practice has been to stop leaning on videos to do all the hard work for me. It takes a lot more thought and skill to convey complex physical processes like this one clearly. But perhaps I’ve reached the limit of my skillset to do it (Substack is also telling me I’ve reached the size limit for an email, which feels like a sign to stop).
If you’ve made it all the way to this point in this piece then you are probably really interested in how this process works so you can do it for yourself. Its all about experimentation and trying things out. Gold is very temperamental, no gild is ever perfect. Its taken me a decade to get comfortable with handling gold leaf and I’m still only scratching the 0.2 micron thin surface of my understanding of it. But that’s also part of what makes it so attractive to explore, the endless pursuit of a an impossible ‘perfect’ gild. This new Tree of Life piece is just a step on the golden brick road I’ve been travelling down for some time now.
I love this detailed description, probably not going to try it myself but nevertheless enjoying the process in my head. I shall pop along to see your exhibition.