T-I-M-B-E-R !

David Hockney's horror after trees he was half-way through painting are 'massacred'.

For more than a century they stood proudly beside a tranquil country road.
Their bleak, black branches formed dramatic silhouettes against the winter sky, their leaves in summer a rich, majestic green.
To any ordinary eye, the copse probably looked like scores of others that punctuate the Yorkshire landscape. But to artist David Hockney, it was a scene of particular beauty.

Such was his passion for the magnificence of the beech and sycamores that he decided to paint them in all four seasons. Winter came and went and was committed to canvas. Summer, too, was recorded in all its glory.
How he must have been looking forward to capturing the fresh colour of spring produce and the hues of autumn.
Then. . . disaster. Or more specifically: 'T-I-M-B-E-R!'
When the artist returned to the scene this week, he found it had vanished. A gaping space was all that remained - plus a pile of sawn trunks and limbs that used to form the copse at the edge of the Warter Priory estate in the Yorkshire Wolds, formerly owned by the Marquis of Normanby.
Hockney described it as a 'massacre'. The 71-year- old artist detailed his dismay in an interview with The Guardian. Philosophically he believed someone had simply exercised a 'perfect right' to harvest the trees for valuable timber.

From The Daily Mail.

An artist in the news again so soon, a much nicer story this time, although I can well appreciate Mr Hockneys' 'horror'. I wonder if he will find another copse, and start again, or consider it job done? Two paintings, Summer and Winter, is balanced enough, I feel.

My drawing is 'same old, same old', I feel experiments coming on! Maybe.