Sutherland recalled that it was Guernica that revealed to him the expressive potential of what he called "paraphrase". By that he meant the suggestive abstraction of an object to extend its expressive potential. He took natural objects that he found in the countryside and paraphrased them so that they became anthropomorphic, suggesting parts of the body or figures which might be threatening, vulnerable or erotically charged. Such qualities, discernable in these human-like trees, were especially evident in the works made at the end of the 1930s and became associated with the air of anxiety at Europe’s descent into war.