Oak Tree (Art Puzzle)

Title: “Oak Tree (Art Puzzle)”

Life-sized handmade solid oak art puzzle (Limited Edition of 7) Full image.
60cm (H) x 61cm (W) x 4.4cm (depth) @ 11.8kg weight
Solid European Oak, hand-cut, hand-engraved, art puzzle.

It started out as a clock!

I can’t remember why, but this started out as a design for a clock! But after a short while I decided I should make a clock jigsaw puzzle and an oak tree jigsaw puzzle – as completely separate works.

My Favourite Tree

The oak (English Oak – Quercus robur) – is probably my favourite English tree, and I’ve wanted for many years to pay homage to them. I’ve travelled quite a bit over the UK, and often it has been to get somewhere lovely by sunrise – or close to it – and often I’ve driven home at sundown – because I don’t particularly like driving in the dark (for the simple reason I can’t see anything). So I have seen a lot of sun rises and sunsets (sometimes both in the same day) – and the visions that stand out most in my memory are oak trees with the sun rising or setting behind them. Many an oak I have seen with blood red skies, blazing yellow and orange skies, gloomy slate skies, fresh cold blue skies, stiflingly hot blue skies.

A great irony of the massive plunder we have done of the natural oak forests in the UK is that the very few trees that remain really stand out alone in the landscape. Often you will see a solitary great oak forming part of a hedge, or standing proud in the middle of a field. And so we can probably see and appreciate them much better now than if we were to go back a thousand years or more – when the country was blanketed in them – and you literally couldn’t see the tree for the forests.

I particularly like to see oak trees in winter – when you can see their gnarly cauliflower-shaped fractal trunks, branches, and twigs – and the great silhouettes formed by the trees and the ubiquitous chocking parasitic ivy.

How to capture the essence of an Oak Tree?

A 2D photograph doesn’t do an oak tree justice because there is so much to them. But as a starting point, what better way to depict an oak tree than by carving an oak tree from a big chunk oak…?

How to capture an oak tree in all of its many different guises? Among other things, I wanted to try to depict their status as a keystone species. So many species of mammals (like squirrels, mice, bats), insects (like moths, butterflies (and their caterpillars), and flies), most woodland birds (like owls, tree creepers, nuthatches, tits, finches, warblers, pigeons, doves) – depend on the oak as a place to live. Birds and bats live, rest, and/or nest in the branches, holes bored into the wood, or simply cracks in the bark. Insects shelter on, and in, the bark and leaves (often highly camouflaged). Many parasitic plants like ivy and mosses live on it, as do many species of lichens and fungi.

Many species depend on oak trees directly or indirectly for food: fungi have a symbiotic relationship with them, bees and wasps pollenate its flowers in spring, insects eat its leaves, bark, and wood. Moths prey on its flies, bats prey on its moths.

Birds eat the oak tree’s caterpillars (of the butterflies and moths) – indeed many, like tits, specifically time their breeding to coincide with the huge glut of the caterpillars in spring – and most warblers in the UK travel all the way from Africa in early spring specifically to do this. Jays, squirrels, and some wasps and bees feed on the acorns, but it is the Jays and squirrels that actually hugely benefit the oak tree by spreading its acorns (seeds) far from where they fall. Without these, the oak tree would depend on the very poor and unreliable mechanical dispersal of acorns rolling downhill or being washed by rain water away from its canopy – in order to spread far and away, and stand a good chance of survival (often there are no plants on the ground under an oak tree’s canopy because of its very dense leaf cover and the competition for nutrients – so this is a very hostile place for the oak tree’s own seedlings to grow).

The oak tree is a keystone species even when it is dead (or killed). Fungi, lichen, mosses, and insects will eat and/or digest them, many insects will lay their eggs in them (which in turn will eat the dead wood), and homo sapiens have built navies, buildings, used them as firewood and in the smelting of metal ores and in metals for thousands of years.

So in a very small way I have tried to capture some of this ecological complexity…

Fractals

I also wanted to capture something about the oak tree’s fractal appearance. Small branches resemble a whole tree, and so do large branches. If they are pollarded, what look like whole trees grow out of their stump.

Seasonality

I also wanted to capture something about the oak’s seasonal differences – specifically that they have two distinct personalities: one with leaves and one without leaves. Most of the leaf clumps (summer) in the work can be removed – leaving exposed branches (winter).

Oak’s Fruit

I wanted to capture something about the fruit of the tree – the humble acorn – and how that tiny thing can grow into a monster of a plant – with the chance of living five hundred years or more – and it’s dead body – timber – in the right conditions capable of surviving a thousand years or more.

Why a Jigsaw Puzzle?

A jigsaw puzzle seemed a very apt way to represent or capture some the complexity and interconnectedness of the oak tree – which is very interesting because this is proving to be a very fruitful visual communication medium phase I am going through at the moment (I have worked in many art mediums)…

A jigsaw puzzle is, among other things, a metaphor for my appreication of the wonder of Nature and its mysteries. It is my (very feeble) 2D representation of the 4D (3D + time = 4D) complexties and variaties of some of the huge number of spieces’ interconnectedness – where jigsaw pieces and carved lines are symbolic of some of Nature’s species, camouflage, and its mixed uses.

Naturally, with this jigsaw puzzle being made of quite chunky oak, the hard, heavy, wood directly communicates oakness to the viewer. So in some unique, and perhaps mysterious, way, the material and the original whole subject – the oak tree – express each other…

Texture

Finally I wanted to capture the texture of the tree – particularly its very rough bark. I’ve tried to do this by the tactile nature of the puzzle pieces and the engraving on the work.

“Limited Edition” of 7

The phrase limited edition in this case is a bit of a misnomer. These are all individually handmade by me from my original design. I really wish there was, but there is no mechanical or chemical process I know of by which these can be reproduced – like screen printing, lithographs, card puzzles (using a die and jigsaw press), etc.