Fortune gave Mark Frith a boyhood of unfettered wandering amongst hedgerow, hay meadow and woodland, deep in the English countryside. As he described, "aimless days whose sole purpose, it seemed, was to avoid the tiresome attentions of the adult world whilst plundering the many wonders of the natural one."
Dreaming his way through greenwood and grassland Mark stumbled across one of the major characters of the locality, the Great Oak at Nibley Green. A fantastical giant, impossibly old, a treasure trove filled with wonder enough to overflow his young imagination. Inside and out, up and down, in the company of jackdaws, foxes, mice, barn owls, beetles and bats Mark explored bark, bough, twig, leaf, acorn and the mouldering, cavernous hollow interior of that ancient tree.
No surprise then that the first tree Mark should ever draw, in 2010, was that same Great Oak at Nibley Green. He embarked on the drawing with no great purpose other than that, finding himself living back in his childhood home, the tree was there. Gradually, over the two months spent working on the drawing, Mark became aware of a curious sensation – at times the tree appeared to draw itself. His hand would move over the paper at a remove from my conscious mind. At the same time Mark seemed to feel the twigs, the texture of the bark, the weight of the branches. Mark could even smell the mouldering decay of the hollow interior. Allied to these curious sensations was a sense that the overall image in the drawing came from somewhere beyond the tree in front of him – as of course it did. That dreaming boy had become father to the man.
This sensation of almost automatic drawing was repeated over and over again as Mark worked on his first series of ancient oak portraits. Mark feels he owes a debt of thanks then to that small boy, whose aimless wanderings and untutored learning has come to fruition in his later drawings. Drawings that Mark hopes in some modest way express man's profound relationship with trees and, if it has one, something of the soul of the ancient oak tree.