The Hawthorn Tree

A Madonna of the Commute

The Hawthorn Tree, the first painting in Agony in the Garden: Series 1, stands at the threshold between past and present, the sacred and the everyday. A nude woman, poised and upright, waits on a crowded tube platform. She is still. Composed. Entirely alone in her awareness — and yet she stands shoulder to shoulder with a mass of commuters, each one lost in the soft glow of their phone screens.

There is no confrontation in her stance, no shame or eroticism. She is not offered to the viewer. She simply exists — a quiet human presence amid a distracted crowd. Her nakedness is not the subject; it is the condition. And the real drama of the painting lies not in her exposure, but in the collective indifference that surrounds her.

Where we might expect vulnerability, we find poise. Where we might expect judgement, we find reflection.

Composition and Symbol

The painting is anchored in a classical structure — a central figure flanked by mirrored thresholds, suggesting both entrance and exit, choice and indecision. It’s a composition borrowed from religious painting, but repurposed here in a modern context.

Earthy tones dominate the palette, grounding the scene in the lineage of oil painting and connecting the contemporary subject to an older visual language. But the eye is pulled again and again to a single jolt of colour: the cadmium red of the TFL roundel, glowing behind the woman’s head like a neon halo.

It’s a striking juxtaposition. The tube logo, so often overlooked, becomes an icon — not of travel, but of reverence. The woman is deified not because she is nude, but because she is awake. In this moment, her gaze meets ours, and we are no longer in the crowd — we are with her.

Is she the Madonna? A secular saint? Or simply a mirror — a way to see ourselves as more than consumers of information and movement?

Making and Intent

Like the rest of Agony in the Garden, The Hawthorn Tree is painted in oil and beeswax. The textured impasto contrasts with translucent glazes to create a tension between physicality and atmosphere. I was interested in what it meant to bring the boldness of Rembrandt’s surface into conversation with the refined stillness of Maxfield Parrish’s colour world. That friction mirrors the content: isolation vs. immersion, individual vs. collective, interior vs. exterior.

It’s a painting about noticing — and being noticed.

A Moment Between Worlds

The hawthorn itself, though not pictured, is present in the title — a reference to boundary, protection, and ancient symbolism. In folklore, the hawthorn marks the edge of the known world. That’s exactly where this painting sits: on the platform between inner life and outward performance, between historical weight and present-day apathy.

In a society moving faster and looking down, The Hawthorn Tree asks us to look up. To stop. To see. And maybe, if only for a second, to be seen.