Exploring the New Forest

An interview with Kevin McGillivray

What inspired you to create “The New Forest” series? I’m curious about the connection between the leaves and the figures, particularly in the two self-portraits. Is there a personal or symbolic meaning behind the leaf motifs?

The series happened quite literally intuitively and organically. I can describe meaning in it now looking back, but I didn’t intend it—I was very much following intuitive nudges and curiosity.

In our neighborhood there’s a wooded ravine covered in thick layers of leaves. When we moved here last year, we enjoyed identifying the types of trees nearby and getting to know them. It felt like we were living in a warm, protective leaf blanket. For some reason I was really excited to start a compost pile for our garden, and I think with all the leaves I started to feel a bit like compost myself.

Over the winter I was in my studio and had a pile of leaves I had collected. I started drawing the leaves as an exercise to practice gesture and composition, and also started experimenting with leaves and other subjects as elements in larger figure drawings. I was drawing self portraits and experimenting with toning paper with charcoal powder… so all of this eventually merged into these drawings.

The “Green Man” is a significant figure in mythology. How did you decide to depict yourself as the Green Man?

I read a story years ago about how the city of Melbourne gave each tree in the city an email address so that residents could report trees that needed care. As a result, the city received thousands of emails written to the trees themselves—love letters, messages asking for advice, questions about what it’s like to be a tree.

The New Forest is about that instinct to try to make contact with the more than human world. In fantasy stories there’s always an old forest that seems to defend its own boundaries as one untamed, connected system. The “new forest” is imagining what happens when a young, wild woods expands to take over what human civilization has chosen to leave behind, the beginning of its long life to becoming an old forest.

The foliate head motif, a head sprouting or surrounded by leaves more popularly known as the Green Man, is about this boundary too. He appears half human and half vegetable. He lives in the margins of books and medieval churches as a decorative element, and recently caused a stir when he was included in the invitations to King Charles’ coronation. But despite how frequently he appears, he has no defined identity—the Green Man is a more modern name, but historically there was no record of a single myth or name.

The Green Man’s mysterious, wordless stare might be interpreted in many ways. On the surface, he might be seen as a suspicious stranger, an outsider looking in at the shelter of our campsite or encountered in the dark forest. From a symbolic perspective, he might represent the exciting and rejuvenating forward march of spring, the sense that after every winter the green summer will flourish again. From another perspective, he brings to mind the images of ruined buildings and old roads, a symbol of the human world gradually decaying and being subsumed by the relentless and inevitable growth of nature. From all angles, he prompts us to wonder: what lives in the boundary between?

The inclusion of “Statue of Artemis with Leaves” adds a classical element to the series. How does mythology, and particularly Artemis, fit into the broader theme of nature in your work? I’m interested in how this ties into the natural world you’re depicting and the larger narrative of the series.

Aren’t people always talking about the gods and hubris? In the decaying relationship between humans and our environment, I’m not sure Artemis would take our side. She’s a guardian and caretaker of the forest, a protector-huntress who does what is best for its health and well-being. She stopped human wars because a king killed her sacred deer. Imagine what she would like to do to us now.

In the world of the New Forest, many human artifacts are being subsumed by new growth. Marble statues are among the closest human craft has come to being nature. I just like to imagine the woods growing up around the ruins of our art.

My friend Jason was recently telling me about the two modes of Hermes, Hermes of the light and Hermes of the dark, Hermes the disenchanter and Hermes the enchanter, which I think is represented in the sleeping and awake Green Man. We have a lot of disenchanting to do on the way to enchantment.

Could you talk about the process behind creating these drawings? I’d love to hear more about your technique, especially how you approached the balance of form and natural elements.

An interesting detail in the self portraits is that I drew them while looking in a mirror, but I’m nearsighted, so for the “awake” drawing I was sitting about 4 inches from the mirror. For the “asleep” drawing I had to close one eye at a time to see what the other eye looked like closed. For the leaves I would hold up a leaf near my head to see the light and shapes. It probably looked a bit odd.