John Blandy - Artist

If you find yourself looking for shade in a leafy park in Brondesbury, it might be worth glancing at the ground. Over the course of two years artist John Blandy has made imprints of his feet on the grass of Queen¹s Park, simply by standing in one spot, drawing the same lime tree 375 times. His installation at the Kingsgate Gallery in West Hampstead of 136 of these drawings is a startling piece of work.

Both traditional, in its depiction of the tree and conceptual in approach, it is unusually involving. Arranged in blocks of twelve or 16 drawings, it feels like you are standing inside a great sundial as you start to notice the progression of the shadows around the tree.

By observing one piece of nature intensely over a long period of time, patterns emerge. Not only the patterns of the seasons, but also the routines, and possible stories, of the people coming and going in the park. Blandy who is based in Montrose Avenue, says of his work: "It's like you go out and have a conversation with somebody. It's an evolving thing. While the images remain formally the same, things happen, things change."

The leaves change from the brightest green haze of early spring through to a misty autumn day and the raw spiky branches of winter. The sense of time passing through observation of the seasons is a diluted one for any city dweller. Yet here in the gallery he has condensed two years' work into a sort of pictorial calendar. Carefully dating the drawings to the hour and day, they take on a mathematical dimension, like scientific data.

"You can see which was a dry year or wet year. You notice the incidental details like a red car passing by or a yellow van. You are part of the landscape," he says.

"Half the tree is under the ground. There is something almost permanent, but also changing. It is like the tree is breathing in and out."

This sense of the tree as a living presence comes across in the gallery. You can almost hear the sea-like rustling of the leaves as you move from frame to frame. It's intense in the same way that children scrutinise things minutely. Blandy has spent much of his career following things. At St Martin's and the Royal College in the 70's he followed the course of rivers and their changes. Since then journeys and trees have dominated his work; whether following in the footsteps of Byron, Napoleon and Goethe or the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella. He has had a number of shows at the Francis Kyle gallery and was recently commissioned by the Arab League to paint historic sites in Jerusalem. This new commission of the place he calls "a cauldron" will be exhibited in a solo show at the Mall Galleries this autumn.

Perhaps his wandering restlessness has been satisfied in some way by his analysis of a single tree. Why pick on a single tree, I wonder? "It doesn't move." he replies.

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