After the success of ‘The Arborealists: The Art of Trees’ at the Art Bermondsey Project Space (home of STATE art magazine) in December, there is now a major new exhibition of 43 Arborealists to be held at The Black Swan Arts gallery in Frome.

The exhibition will feature a Paul Nash, one of the most significant British landscape artists of the 20th century, and artists of international reputation, including Ffiona Lewis of the Redfern Gallery.

Visitors will be able to view Nash’s painting ‘Pond in the Fields’ (1927), which has been shown in public on only four previous occasions: Leicester Gallery in 1928, Venice in 1938, the National Gallery in 1940 and the Tate Gallery in 1948.

Nash was official artist for both World Wars, and known particularly for his powerful mudscapes of Passchendaele. Trees have been a feature of his work throughout his life, from his early watercolours of a line of pollarded elms in his family garden in Buckinghamshire to the ragged stumps in his war commissions, and in later paintings of Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire.

‘Pond in the Fields’ was inspired by ancient features of the English landscape and depicts trees clustered around a dark pond, suggesting maybe a reclusive tree bathing experience to invigorate the soul.

The Arborealists were founded by Tim Craven in 2013, following the seminal exhibition, ‘Under the Greenwood: Picturing the British Tree’, shown at St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery in Lymington, New Forest.

United by their subject, a diverse range of working practices results in exhibits that range from dramatic and contemplative to hyperreal and surreal. Historically, artists such as Gainsborough and Constable, through to the Neo-Romantics and Ruralists have been inspired by trees, and the versatility of the subject providing a rich variety of character, form and texture which are associated with myth, folk-lore, religious and symbolic meaning accumulated over the centuries.

The importance and beauty of trees in today’s disrupted environment is more significant than ever and this exhibition, will see many of these great Arborealists coming together whose various roots come from the West of England, including Howard Phipps, Blaze Cyan, Jacqui Wedlake-Hatton, Graham Arnold, Abi Kremer, Fiona Hingston, Philippa Beale, Fiona McIntyre and Paul Newman, as well as renowned guest artists from the Frome area including Clive Walley, Jim Whitty and Emma Tuck.

The Arborealists and Guests at Black Swan Arts will be open Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

For more details visit: www.blackswan.org.uk