Graeme Black's Trunk Show opens at Messums Harrogate on May 7
Credit: Messums
In a year which has seen many of us lunge towards the great outdoors, Graeme Black’s career conversion seems remarkably prescient. It’s five years now since the fiftysomething Scot, having built an enviable career in fashion, holding top jobs at Galliano, Armani and Salvatore Ferragamo, quit it all in order to paint – to stalk the forest near his home in the Yorkshire Dales, and to make pictures, or “portraits”, of the stunning variety of trees around him. The fact that he’s about to have his first ever exhibition, at the Messums Gallery in Harrogate, is testament to their quality, but he keeps a rigorously Scots no-nonsense modesty about it.