This is my nearly instantaneous drawing of the garden. I’ll call it the after dinner drawing. Sit down, look out the back door, draw, get up.
Foliage abstraction
For today’s morning coffee drawing I looked out the window and drew the dense confusing foliage of a beautiful, but enigmatic tree. When presented with something like the dense confusion of masses of leaves, you do well to simply let yourself go. I let the pen trace the edges of what I thought I saw. I wasn’t concerned about its ever looking like a tree. Honestly it doesn’t really “look like a tree” even in real life. It’s simply a wall of green.
Of course I know it’s a little wood out there so it doesn’t need to “look” like mine or anyone else’s idea of a tree among trees. However in drawing one sometimes wants the stuff to “look like” what it is. Were I too insistent upon that goal in this instance, I suppose I would just never draw this wood because it IS a confusing mass of leaves. Period. That is the reality. There is no beautifully differentiated sense of lovely trees hanging out with other trees. If you were a bird zooming down looking for a branch to light upon, you’d better have terrific navigating skills. Cause it’s a jungle out there.
So sometimes in drawing you let yourself enter the jungle of lines. You just wander around scratching at this and that. Watch the light pour over things and pretend you’re taking a photon’s journey. This didn’t need to be anything more than a meditation upon tangled green confusion.
And that’s what it is. Oh, and the coffee was great.
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