This very distinctive and characterful beech tree sits on the lip of a hollow in the hillside at Selborne, its triangular mass of exposed roots gracefully supporting it. I started to draw it on A3 paper but it didn’t feel right, so I switched to A2, creating my largest fountain pen drawing to date. I can see a number of faces in both the source and the drawing, and the chief of those seems to me to wearing a somewhat enigmatic expression – which was the inspiration for the title.