Artist spends three years painting same tree after deaths of parents and friend

An artist traumatised by the deaths of his parents and a close friend has spent three years in a field painting a single oak tree. Stephen Taylor, 50, went through an emotional crisis following the deaths - one after another in the space of a year - and became obsessed with painting the same tree over and over again.

His parents Lillian, 70, and Jack, 76, died of a brain tumour and heart attack respectively, within a year of each other, while his ex-girlfriend and close friend also died of a brain tumour. Taylor said: “You lose your sense of identity when you lose friends and family and I suddenly didn’t know who I was. I walked into this field one day and just sat down and started to paint. I painted the tree from every angle, in oils and watercolours, I drew it and photographed it.



“At the time I didn’t think about why I was doing it, but looking back now I think I was trying to feel at home. I had lost everything that anchored me. It was a mid-life crisis brought about by the repeated deaths of important people in my life that I was coping with.“ Taylor travelled every day to the East Anglian wheat field from his home in Colchester to document all aspects of the tree.

Now, a book from Princeton Architectural Press has been released of 50 of Stephen’s paintings. Simply titled Oak, the book includes paintings of the 250-year-old oak resplendent in high summer, frozen and bare in deep winter and at all hours of the day and night. Taylor, who studied at Leeds, Essex and Yale universities, said the process was cathartic and the tree had reminded him of pictures he grew up with in his family home in Wolverhampton, West Mids.