In an effort to rediscover my work and focus, as well as to better understand my subject, I am spending much of the month focusing on gesture. I am treating trees as I would the human figure in a figure drawing class and am using quick rough gestures that attempt to ignore the surface and focus on the movement.
In these drawings what I am looking to find is the underlying mainline of movement or the dominant shape running through the length of the tree. In the branches I focus on dominant areas of direction or angle. I also look for areas that feel stressed, such as a hard bend. In a sense this humanizes the tree a bit, for I am suggesting movement beyond the trees actual ability o move. Yet I believe the gesture to be there and I feel this exercise will bring my closer to my trees and hopefully create some interesting work as well. I have posted a few, with more to come soon. They w ill be in the “2009 Drawing” page for now.