A Tree Study 1959

Editor: So this is Robert Medley's "A Tree Study," held at the Tate. It’s quite muted, almost a monochrome, but somehow full of light. It feels like a memory of a tree rather than a portrait. What do you make of it? Curator: It's funny you say "memory," because that's exactly what strikes me too. It's as though Medley isn't just painting what he sees, but what he *remembers* seeing, those fleeting impressions of light and shadow through the leaves. Does it make you think about how our minds reconstruct things? Editor: It does! It makes me wonder what Medley was thinking about when creating this piece. It's like he's showing us how he sees the world filtered through his own experiences. Curator: Exactly! A tree isn't just a tree, it's a vessel for our own personal experiences, captured and expressed through paint.