Mother Willow Tree

Tamsin Rosewell

I loved painting this image! Into it I poured my love of illustration - the influence of all the great illustrators whose work I have loved since I was a child are in there somewhere: Arthur Rackham, Errol le Cain, Brian Wildsmith, Jan Pienkowski, Michael Foreman and so many others. To me this is a sort of homage to all of these people. I think Mother Willow Tree was one of the first of Ange’s songs that I heard. As a piece of storytelling folk, it is brimming with all the motifs of our oldest fairy tales. There is moonlight, the hunter avenged, the power of our landscape’s protective trees, magical hares, shape-shifting forest dwellers and the magical power of blood. As I often do I hid all sorts of creatures in the painting, mainly for Ange’s small children to enjoy finding!