News from Nowhere
Trees
"I have been painting and drawing trees for over 30 years as they have always fascinated me. I have tried to use my portrait painter’s scrutiny to make powerful portraits of them, trying to convey each tree’s individuality and spirit.
The tree drawings I made last year have culminated in large 3 metre contemporary paintings, that are about nature meeting the city, the urban jungle. I populate these paintings with multi cultural figures to convey London’s diversity, street style and on a more important level, our ever-increasing fragile relationship with nature as a society today. I am trying to make a new kind of paintings for he 21st century.
In the daytime the forest feels sweet and welcoming, but at night they are scary places to enter, every fable, poem, story, film and novels you have seen and read makes us all terrified to enter the dark forest because we know all the dark creatures of the night, ghosts and spirits start to wake up (A perfect metaphor the the artists studio). There is a time in-between day and night, sometimes called the blue hour, which is mysterious, hauntingly beautiful and I want to turn my artist fingers into magic wands to convey this. Just like the 14th century poet Dante, I want the viewer to be able to enter the underworld, see all of the terrible things of our modern world and then make their way back to the light with their heart filled with love.
Our relationship to nature is reaching a critical point and our hyper capitalist model is destroying the planet for profit. We have to find a different path in the forest to take us to the light.
Nahem Shoa
In the daytime the forest feels sweet and welcoming, but at night they are scary places to enter, every fable, poem, story, film and novels you have seen and read makes us all terrified to enter the dark forest because we know all the dark creatures of the night, ghosts and spirits start to wake up (A perfect metaphor the the artists studio). There is a time in-between day and night, sometimes called the blue hour, which is mysterious, hauntingly beautiful and I want to turn my artist fingers into magic wands to convey this. Just like the 14th century poet Dante, I want the viewer to be able to enter the underworld, see all of the terrible things of our modern world and then make their way back to the light with their heart filled with love.
Our relationship to nature is reaching a critical point and our hyper capitalist model is destroying the planet for profit. We have to find a different path in the forest to take us to the light.
Nahem Shoa
Other Worlds
I spent over 4 months in 2018 drawing trees from life in London Parks and Heaths culminating in around 50 drawings. I was trying to find new kinds of marks to convey form, space, leaves, bark and movement, without using conventional tone. I think the best of these drawings are very powerful and original.
"In 2019 I was invited to become a member of The Arborealsists," Nahem Shoa
