Graeme Black's Trunk Show At Silas Marder Gallery

Trunk shows, in common parlance, are sales events where designers, or companies, can present their products to potential buyers. They can give smaller operations a chance to get face-to-face with clientele and show off what makes their work unique, personalizing and differentiating it from the competition.

Graeme Black is no stranger to them. A painter who made a career transition out of the upper echelons of the fashion world, Black attended many a trunk show when he had his own brand. But he’s bringing a different sort of one to the Silas Marder Gallery this month: the arboreal kind of trunks, in oil, on huge raw canvas. The show, which runs from June 11 to July 10, still contains the spirit of a typical trunk show; Black, a Brit, will be bringing his work across the ocean for his first solo show in America, presenting a new audience with his way of looking at the omnipresent but always surprising perennial.

In a way, his later-in-life return to nature makes sense; Black grew up on a farm, and his grandfather was a farmer. He was born and raised in Angus and despite not knowing anyone in the world of fashion or having a real sense of the industry, Black knew it excited him. He studied fashion and textiles in Edinburgh, Scotland and from there, went straight to London. After stints with various designers he headed to Milan to try something new, and ended up spending 16 years in Italy, working for Giorgio Armani and Salvatore Ferragamo. These experiences in the hub of the fashion world honed his skills, and took him around the world, but always within someone else’s blueprint.

“As a designer, I was always wanting to express myself and my vision, what I thought,” Black said in a recent interview. “Because I had worked for so many different brands, I wanted to say, ‘Okay, this is who I am.’ So while I was at Ferragamo, I made the crazy decision of starting my brand out of Milan, all Italian-made.

“I spent a lot of time going on trunk shows to America — we started at Saks in New York, with all our clothes and [went] to Chicago, Texas, finished off in San Francisco and LA,” he added. “It’s a great way of doing business, because as a young designer with no name, as an independent designer, you’d have to really be in contact with your client, really express yourself to [explain] ‘Why is it expensive? Why should I buy this and not something else?’ And I loved coming to the states.”

Then came the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out his brand. He realized running his own business left little room for actual creative work and it wasn’t what he wanted.

“So I stopped it, and it was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever done,” Black said. “I worked with all these small factories in Italy, which were amazing — 30 to 50 women who would make the knitwear. To stop those amazing relationships … It was really sad. It was a horrific time. I decided that that wasn’t going to go into bankruptcy. I was going to pay all my people, all my factories. And so I got a job again.”

Black ended up at a Chinese cashmere brand where he had a lot of creative freedom, and spent six years there. But going back and forth, he started to realize he wanted something new. He and his partner began to look for property in North Yorkshire and to consider what a career outside of the world of fashion might be.

“That was a really scary thing because if you’ve done something for many, many years and you’re good at it because you’ve honed your skills, to stop that and go, ‘Okay, I’m going to now try painting and drawing,’ was really tough,” Black said.

The first year was rough, but Black went into it with the spirit of experimentation. He focused on acquiring skills, learning the techniques of painting. He had a tutor for portraiture, but didn’t feel so drawn to representation. At the same time, he and his partner were in North Yorkshire, surrounded by moorland and forest. They began to renovate a house and get involved with land management, planting trees, thinking of the bees and editing the landscape. Black went for walks in the woods with his two dogs and spent more time and energy in and on nature.

“I began to notice that as the seasons changed, so did the bark on the trees, so did the nature around me,” Black said. “It sounds like a weird thing, but I hadn’t seen the seasons change in one place because I’d spent so much of my career for decades running around the world, constantly traveling. I’d never actually been anywhere, being in one place.

“One of the reasons I like drawing trees and painting trees is there’s always something different. And the more you look, the more you see,” he added. “The more you look at bark, the more it changes. Look at it in the summer, in spring and winter. With what other weather element is going on around that time, it’s completely different. And that’s really, really interesting.”

With the disciplined approach he developed in his fashion career, Black worked at becoming a painter. Through trial and error he began to grow more skilled and confident in his painting. He converted an old cow barn on his property into a large studio and began to live the schedule of an artist, spending all day in his studio, with breaks to walk his dog in the forest. It was much more isolated than the fitting rooms of his past.

“In fashion, you’re always with people, there’s teams,” he said. “There’s all these people around you. There’s people saying, ‘Oh, I like that.’ When you’re in a studio with a blank canvas, it’s you and a blank canvas. And that can be daunting.”

But he kept at it, with trees becoming his favorite subject. Black’s trees are painted in oil, and they’re not what you might expect from nature painting. By isolating the trunks, leaving the rest of the canvas raw, Black makes the subject the bark, which is really an opportunity to play with color and texture. Thickly layered lines of pigment define the uniqueness and personality of the tree and its three-dimensionality. The fantastic range of values within the humble tree trunk is surprising; Black uses bold, bright neons in some of his work.

“I’d call myself a colorist because I enjoy the stance you have with the color palette. When you start your palette of oil paint in the morning, you’re mixing it up and you’re looking and trying to really understand what’s missing or what’s working,” Black said. “It can be like a dash of orange that gives it that thing that changes the whole atmosphere.”

Black’s trees are large — for this upcoming show on 8-foot-by-8-foot canvases, with multiple diptychs. A lot of his works are within a long thin rectangle of canvas, mirroring the trunk’s shape. When flipped lengthwise, Black called them treescapes, which look less like a trunk and more like a skyline or seascape. But he also varies his composition, intersecting multiple trees with each other or bending their limbs.

Earlier on, Black tried to analytically and realistically capture the trees he saw on his walks around the forest. It may have been good observation practice, but it wasn’t what he was really interested in.

“I think what I want to try and do is give the impression of the tree,” Black said. “Like you’re walking through the forest, there’s a dash of lime, or an acid green, or a soft gray, and there’s a moss that’s bright, bright yellow. You remember it in your mind’s eye from the walk, go into the studio and then try and capture that on a canvas.”

Some of Black’s trees are all in light, warm tones. Others seem more brooding, with lines of dark green. A few have trunks that curve through the canvas while others stand up straighter. He does some in charcoal, too, but the color that comes through for his oil paintings is powerfully rendered.

Black has done one other solo show, in the UK. He was introduced to the Marder family through a friend who had previously worked with them, and, together, they developed the idea of his doing an exhibition with them. For this show, 36 of his paintings will hang in the Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton from June 11 to July 10. It will be Black’s first show in this country. Surrounded by Marder’s nursery, the trees will be among friends.

“In the exhibition, I want to allow people the time to look at trees in a different way and enjoy them in a different way,” Black said. “Hopefully, they find something new that they haven’t perhaps considered in trees. Each one has a different personality and color story and hopefully a different emotion. I really want to show that each one, it’s got a unique quality. You can look at a forest and it’s a bunch of trees, but then you go through the forest and you start seeing individuals within that and you can look closer.”

Graeme Black’s “Trunk Show II” opens with a reception at Silas Marder Gallery, 120 Snake Hollow Road, Bridgehampton, on Saturday, June 11, from 4 to 7 p.m. Reserve for the reception at coco@nivenbreen.com. For more about Graeme Black, visit graemeblack.com.