Two Trees Drawings

This drawing comes directly from the sketchbook in last months post Tickhill Road 28/02/2019. I photographed this on the 1^st September after several stages involving the removing and readding the central tree. The orb on the right is a vestige of the one on the left, an after image if you will. The point about these drawings is that the language developed in the smaller drawings, this one is 100cm x 140cm, forms the basis of the larger ones. The large one is a sort of culmination of the smaller working drawings.

This drawing picks up two days later when I’ve painted the background, the white areas to match the correction from when I replaced the central tree.

This one, three days later, when I decided it was finished and named it.

Two Trees Drawings

This drawing marks the start of the two trees drawings that have occupied the rest of September. Using my usual method of mono printing to give me at least two starts, albeit mirror images, to begin the process.

The sketchbook that inspired these drawings was made in 2016 and came to mind when I was making the Tickhill Road drawings. There is an obvious geographical, local, link but there is also an emotional link that I haven’t quite named yet.

The set of drawings in this case were worked in fours.

There are some on cartridge paper and some on watercolour paper. The watercolour paper gives me cause for concern because it so expensive when I’m making such simple drawings. Years ago I used to work the paper so hard that it wore through but it seems to come a little easier these days.

The drawings are sometimes worked to the point that they are very different as they aim towards the sculptures and environments that will eventually appear.

I started to make maquettes on the 15^th September and worked them alongside the drawings from Two Trees six onwards.

The maquettes are built from the styrofoam wall insulation I used for the red garden sculptures coated with lining paper that I’d used as floor covering for earlier works.

I chopped them about and covered the splits before I painted them with blackboard paint.

I then worked them alongside the smaller drawings, all the time the larger drawing in the background was also underway.

In these drawings I started to pick up some of the random marks in the mono prints and made them more regular as well as reflecting the roadways and other surrounds from the sketchbook.

Two Trees Drawings

I started the larger drawing on the 15^th, putting in a wash to stretch back up over the next couple of days.

I then worked it with chalks and Conte crayon over the next two weeks.

I eventually added the white acrylic but it didn’t work so the next day that went out to be changed to the version below.

I’m not convinced yet but it’s better.

While this went on I was building a larger “tree” using the same method but letting the forms the styrofoam is in dictate the overall form of the finished piece. I decided the important thing was the interplay between the two forms.

The disadvantage of this method is drying time.

The piece, which will have a companion, is 140 cm x 100 cm x 65cm.

It reminds me a little of the ‘Maiastra’  One of Brancusi’s birds from Romanian folklore, but there was no intent to copy that.

At the start of the month I entered the woolgathering video [LINK] to a digital showcase at Fox Yard Studio in Stowmarket and it will be on show for two weeks during October. So I spent a good few hours making a high quality version.

I’ve continued to draw but haven’t uploaded Spetember’s drawings yet.