OUR LANDSCAPE: PAINT IT OR LOSE IT Alain de Botton Country Life, March 2009 Nothing else captures the spirit

of the countryside like a landscape painter, argues Alain de Botton as he meets the champion of this fine art One of the many reasons we have been so thoroughly good at destroying the countryside in the past century is that we've stopped trying to draw and paint it. At best, we take pictures of it on our mobile phones, but this cuts us off from one of the great side-effects of all painting: the fostering of a capacity to look properly, care for and eventually love what's in front of our eyes. Try to draw anything patiently, be it a flower, or a tree or some light falling on a table, and you can't help but come away from the experience with your respect for nature enhanced. I've been writing a book about people at work, and, after spending a lot of time in offices and factories last summer, I ended up following a very different sort of occupation. I went to a field in Essex to observe a painter who has spent the past two years painting the very same 250-year-old oak tree in a variety of lights and seasons. You won't have heard of Stephen Taylor, as he's one of a declining breed of English landscape painters, entirely ignored by the critical establishment, an heir to Turner who won't ever win the Turner prize because of the quaintness and simplicity of his ambition: to get people to look at trees more closely and more lovingly. Mr Taylor first came across his tree five years ago, when he was out for a walk in the countryside following the death of his girlfriend. After stopping to rest against the fence which runs beside it, he was overpowered by a feeling that something in this very ordinary tree was crying out to be set down in paint, and that if he could only do it justice, his life would in indistinct ways be redeemed, and its hardships sublimated. Mr Taylor is tormented by a sense of responsibility for the appearance of things. He can be kept awake at night by what he sees as an injustice in the colour of wheat or an uneasy fault line between two patches of sky. His work frequently puts him in a tense, silent mood, in which he can be seen walking the streets of Colchester where he lives. His concerns are difficult for others to feel sympathetic about, however, for few of us are primed to feel generous towards a misery caused by a pigment incorrectly applied across an unremunerative piece of stretched cloth. His progress is slow: he can spend five months on a canvas measuring 20in square. But his painstaking approach is, in truth, the legacy of more than 20 years of research. It took him three years just to determine how best to render the movement of wheat in a gust of wind, and even longer to become proficient in colour. Whereas a decade ago he would have used at least 10 shades of green to paint the tree's foliage, he now relies on only three, and yet his leaves appear all the more luxuriously dense and mobile for this reduction in complexity. Mr Taylor accepts the restricted nature of the challenge he has set himself. An essay he wrote to accompany an exhibition of half a decade of painting opened with the following declaration: 'For most of my adult life, I have worked on certain observations of the physical world. In particular, for the past ten years, I have been interested in changes of light as you look towards and away from the sun'-a summation of ambition finely poised between selfdeprecation and megalomania. He sees his art as born out of, and hoping to inspire, reverence for all that is unlike us and exceeds us. He never wanted to paint the work of people, their factories, streets, or electricity circuit boards. His attention was drawn to that which, because we didn't build it, we must make a particular effort of empathy and imagination to understand, to a natural environment that is uniquely unpredictable, for it is literally unforeseen. His devoted look at a tree is an attempt to push the self aside and recognise all that is other and beyond us-starting with this ancient-looking hulk in the gloom, with its erratic branches, thousands of stiff little leaves and remarkable lack of any direct connection to the human drama. Mr Taylor's tree paintings are, in a sense, comparable to advertising billboards, although instead of forcing us to

focus on a specific brand of margarine or discounted airline fares, they incite us to contemplate the meaning of nature, the yearly cycles of growth and decay, the intricacies of the vegetal and animal realms, our lost connection with the earth and the redemptive powers of modest dappled things. We might define art as anything that pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions. The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder. They fix that which is fugitive: the cooling shadow of an oak on a windless, hot summer afternoon; the golden-brown tint of leaves in the early days of autumn; the stoical sadness of a bare tree glimpsed from a train, outlined against a heavy, pregnant-grey sky. We can't all be talented landscape artists, but Mr Taylor's work reminds us how much we can learn from what such people naturally do: put themselves aside for a time and give themselves over to a humble respect and admiration for nature.