Woods of Caledon: the paintings.

These paintings seek to capture the nature and the spirit of Scotland’s Caledonian Forest and in so doing owe a debt to the Brabazon School and the Sois-Bois genre that followed and developed from it through the nineteen and into the twentieth century.

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement, active from c. 1830 through to c. 1870 towards realism in art. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon in France on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. Most of their works were landscape paintings, but several of them also painted genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, colour, loose brushwork, and softness of form.

Rather than painting the scene from afar like traditional landscape painters, the Barbizon artists presented a close-up view of the subject of the painting, recording their experience within the forest and many of the paintings have a portrait (vertical) rather than a landscape (horizontal) orientation. Paintings of this type became known as sous-bois. This French term sous-bois refers to a forest-floor or undergrowth, and to the 19th century painters who cast aside tradition and journeyed into the forests to paint close-up, rather than from a distance.

This approach to painting of woodland and forest subjects was rare before the 19th century, but was adopted and developed by later individual artists and art movements including the impressionists, post impressionists (especially Van Gogh and Cezanne), and the symbolists. Intermittantly it is seen in the works of more modernist painters such as Ivon Hitchens.

To learn more about the Sois-Bois Genre please click on the link below: [link yet to be added]

The oil paintings of Scottish pinewoods in this gallery fall into approximately two groups:

1. largely figuratve impressionist works based on real places, albeit with some latitude for interpretation. These include works that would fall into the Sois- bois category, but also other more conventional landscape works.

2. semi abstract and often expressionist works intended to capture the essence of the forest in some way other than a literal representation. Again some of these works are akin to later symboist, cubist, expressionist and modernist manifestations of the sois-bois genre.