In the summer of 1958, Coker undertook a pilgrimage to Antibes in southern France, the town to which de Staël retreated in 1953 and where he ultimately committed suicide in 1955. The trip was resoundingly disappointing and Coker did not return to France until 1965. Instead, for seven years he immersed himself in the ancient forests and coastlines closer to home. Working at Colchester School of Art, Coker befriended the community of artists based in East Anglia including Edward Bawden and John
Nash, moving with his family to Mistley on the border between North Essex and Suffolk in 1962. Whilst Bawden and Nash represented a quintessentially British school, rooted in the romantic tradition of bucolic rural scenes, Coker channeled the spirit
of de Staël in his woodland landscapes, producing scenes that were familiar and yet startlingly modern.

For Coker’s third solo exhibition with Zwemmer Gallery in 1959, Epping Forest served as his artistic muse: he produced nine oils and seven drawings that constituted the heart of the show. Forest IV and Forest VI, both painted in 1959, were works 9 and 11
in the Zwemmer Gallery catalogue respectively. Forest VI is, exceptionally, painted on board – Coker shifted away from the wooden supports of previous works and moved to employing canvases for the Epping Forest series, initiating a trajectory towards
canvas as his standard backing. In both works, Coker focuses on the lower regions of the forest – a maze of tree trunks spring from the forest ground, transitioning from singularly defined trees into the background of a haze of greenery.

The presence of de Staël is palpable in both Forest IV and Forest VI. In an extended passage discussing the tangible influence of de Staël on his work, Coker stated: “De Staël has this wonderful sense of matière which especially appealed to me. Also the
degree to which he took reality towards abstraction without departing from it. But also the actual physical nature of overlapping and underlaying. The verticality of de Staël was very sympathetic to me. I found myself being constricted by three dimensional
depth and wanted to lift things up vertically and place them like a series of playing cards, thus creating the space on a vertical plane.” The texture of paint, particularly in the immediate foreground of both paintings, echoes de Staël’s handling of paint: in
Forest IV a lush, expressionistic passage describing the golden earth sweeps across the base of the canvas whilst in Forest VI the plaster-like texture of paint fractures to reveal a multitude of built-up paint layers. In both works, trunks and branches strain upwards, surging past the uppermost edge of the composition. Verticality reigns supreme whilst an emphasis on formal structure and a uniform consistency of surface threaten to overwhelm legibility of subject. Coker edges towards abstraction, catching himself just on the verge: “you could paint the feeling, the experience of place without actually registering the factual nature of it, though I never lost a sense of the factual world.”