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Original oils, watercolours and drawings from £55 each on panels of Dorst oak or watermarked handmade paper
Dorset Oak Panels
When a hurriace struck the South of England on the night of 15 - 16th October 1987 an estimated 15,000,000 trees were destroyed in a single night (Kew Garden Statistics).
In order to save something from the chainsaw I began acquiring various timbers with a view to making panels for oil paintings as used from mediaeval times by such painters as Leonardo da Vinci, Van Eyck, Rembrandt, and Rubens. The stability of carefully seasoned fine woods has contributed to their paintings lasting for hundreds of years.
I had earlier seasoned some elm when those great trees were decimated by disease. Now, the National Trust and the Conservators of Epping Forest helped me collect examples of box, cherry, lime, beech, and yew. However, the king of panel timbers is the slow-grown fine English oak. Magnificent trees of great age from Kingston Lacy, Kingcombe, Fiddleford and Shillingstone were planked and seasoned.
This initial handful of miniature panels comes from New Cross near Shillingstone. In the lane to Hammoon, a large limb of oak was salvaged on 22nd October 1987 and it is this that has been seasoned for twenty years to make the panels seen here.
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