trees have featured largely in my paintings, since my very first day at Psalter Lane Art College Sheffield, when the lecturer instructed us- go out into Sheffield, and find trees, draw the bark, as many as you can find.. and so we did. She had very good ideas but sadly died from over use by lab st barths Human research who went through the staff like a dose of salts, as usual pressing with a remote beam all body organs and collapsed her lung from whence she died. I realised long ago as a child, you cannot cry when you are dead, so decided to be grateful even to be able to cry, though I cry for others more often. My hungarian mother left me with this characteristic that I get mad, rather than sad, then, because I am in England, have to control my anger and bite my lip. I included the Ukrainian colours in this to show my sorrow for my Ukrainian dad's first wife, hiding in the forests, who colluded to help him escape from a Gulag in Siberia, where he had wrongfully been sent, at the accusations of his Jewish boss, who had asked him to falsify the accounts for him. Dad was a God-fearing man and painfully honest to his last days and an accountant at a kolhosp. He escaped but she was caught. I cannot even go into the tortures meted out to her, they are so horrible,in the end she begged one of the guards to kill her. She was a Muscovite, maybe he was one too, and he chopped her arms off with an axe and that killed her, having. It is amazing how long a body can stay alive with its organs ripped out. In the end they threw her ripped and chopped apart body into the meat for cooking. I had never realised that human men have this ''thing'' for chopping other humans up, till I read about Arnhem, when the British army thought that was Germany and attacked it and CHOPPED up over two thousand citizens, arms off, legs off etc. We are brought up on a diet of HEROIC soldiering and it becomes part of our mentality.