Richard Bavin is a landscape painter with a passion for our native trees and woodland. His practice is a cycle of outdoor exploration and studio work as a distillation of these experiences, most paintings being created out of long term projects about specific locations.
He loves the hours and days sitting quietly with trees, and spends as much time watching weather, light and wildlife as he does sketching. Richard’s visual language is a mix of traditional representations and more experimental marks and colours to try and communicate the sounds, smells and feel of these places alongside his deep emotional connection with them.
Richard studied Fine Art at Hereford College of Art and Gloucestershire University and has a studio at Unit 6 in Hereford. He is an invited member of The Arborealists, a national group of artists united around the tree motif. Site specific collaborations with this group include Exmoor and Dartmoor, Staverton Park and Lady Park Wood in the Wye Valley with woodland ecologist George Peterken MBE. There are links to a professional film and book about the Lady Park Wood project on Richard’s web site.
Artist-in-residence with Herefordshire Wildlife Trust for eight years, much of Richard’s work is about their nature reserves and projects. He is currently making a series of drawings of our increasingly rare Native Black Poplar (Populus Nigra subspecies betulifolia), from sapling to ancient.These rugged and magnificent trees, loved by Constable, were once common on floodplains and wet areas, but numbers have declined enormously through land drainage and intensified farming practices. This loss has been heightened by the cutting down of most female trees, vital for reproduction, because of the perceived ‘mess’ of fluffy white seeds shed from the catkins in early summer. Only six thousand trees remain in the UK, of which a tiny percentage are female, leaving the species on the brink of extinction.
Richard decided to spend time this year making as many drawings as he can of individual native black poplars to celebrate and share their beauty and character, and to help raise awareness of their plight. The Wildlife Trust network, along with other groups, is working hard to reverse this by recording and nurturing those we still have and planting more. Over five hundred have now been established across the county with more going into the ground every year.
North Wood SSSI, Herefordshire Wildlife Trust reserve
Lady Park Wood, Wye Valley (National Nature Reserve)
Birches Farm SSSI, Herefordshire Wildlife Trust reserve
North Wood SSSI, Herefordshire Wildlife Trust reserve