Trees, trees, trees

 Recent drawings; water-soluble pencils and/or ink.

Drawing Tuesday - trees, leaves, grasses

 Self-explanatory topic! Here are a few inspirations. 

William Kentridge's trees are often drawn on book pages

Trees in art history on this blog  (especially John Constable )

Mark Frith's tree drawings (large!), shown at Kew and now online 

Making pen and ink drawings of various trees. At a quick look, there are lots of helpful tips. Also there is mention of white pens. And leaves, and backgrounds.

A video of less than 5 minutes - How to draw a tree with pencil - 

"Trees rarely have curved lines - they are straight lines that change direction". This tree evolves as it goes, rather than being from observation.

Two birds with one stone! - A small project would be to find leaves from several trees you don't know the names of, identify them (free apps are available, eg at https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/british-trees/how-to-identify-trees/ - or look at a chart online, eg https://www.discoverthewild.co.uk/post/british-tree-leaves-sheet) - and combine them into a drawing or rubbing.

"mixed media trees leaves" here

Work by Blaze Cyan at Eames Gallery here

From Richard - What a lovely day, again! Too hot today to linger over this one.

From Sue K - Couldn’t resist the shadows on the leaves thanks to the blast of sun we’re enjoying. This is Hedychium gardnerarium - no flowers yet!

From Ann - A pen and ink watercolour study last year of Devils Dyke in Sussex and a panoramic view of our regular Ally pally walk in gouache. 

From Sue B - a very quick sketch sitting The Lamb Inn garden in Burford…

From Najlaa - The first tree from my neighbor garden and 2nd one is old Mulberry tree.

From Judith - So delicate, a challenge to get the detail.

From Gill - This is a Mokulito print I did last week. It has a bit of chine colle too. Back on the course today with Margaret C.

From Joyce - Here’s a beautiful gnarled tree at Cowden.

From Janet K - The willow tree again. It's great to see their branches growing out. The trees looked very stark - if sculptural - all winter.

From Mags - I had  grand plans of sitting  on a bench in the Rec which has some magnificant trees  (  Faversham Trees Group  had a labelled trail   for National Tree Week ),  channelling my  inner David Nash .  It was  fabulous  when he  was in residence at Kew and you  could see him working and he gave a wonderful talk to staff. 

 Instead  I had a weeding session in the garden  , mainly dandelions and ragwort,   with some oats and barley that had sprouted  near next doors bird table .  I used  a chromium green Pitt calligraphy pen.

From me - One of the knobbly old plane trees in Finsbury Park. Stripped of its leaves (by the eye of the artist). Inktense pencil and waterbrush.

The black marks have nothing to do with the tree - I'm using empty pages in an old, square sketchbook, and this time had to extend the trunk onto the adjacent page; it looked silly in the [ahem] truncated format.

Poetry Thursday - Beech by Elizabeth Jennings

Beech - Elizabeth Jennings

They will not go. These leaves insist on staying.
Coinage like theirs looked frail six weeks ago.
What hintings at, excitement of delaying,
Almost as if some richer fruits could grow

If leaves hung on against each swipe of storm,
If branches bent but still did not give way.
Today is brushed with sun. The leaves are warm.
I picked one from the pavement and it lay

With borrowed shining on my Winter hand.
Persistence of this nature sends the pulse
Beating more rapidly. When will it end,

That pride of leaves? When will the banches be
Utterly bare, and seem like something else,
Now half-forgotten, no part of a tree?

(via)

Elizabeth Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1926, and lived most of her life in Oxford, where she moved in 1932. She was educated at Rye St Antony and Oxford High School before reading English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she began a B.Litt., but left to pursue a career in copy-editing in London. Returning to Oxford to take up a full-time post as a librarian at the city library, Jennings worked briefly at Chatto and Windus before becoming a full-time poet. Her second volume of poetry, A Way of Looking (1955), won the Somerset Maugham Award, which allowed her to travel to Rome, a city which had an immense impact on her poetry and Roman Catholic faith. While she suffered from physical and mental ill health from her early thirties, Jennings was a popular and widely read poet. She received the W.H. Smith award in 1987 for Collected Poems 1953–1985, and in 1992 was awarded a CBE. She died in Rosebank Care Home, Bampton, in 2001 and is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. (via)

Looking up from below

This week's topic for Drawing Tuesday is "View from Below" and I've been wondering what on earth - or rather, on high - to tackle. Being under a tree is an obvious solution, but ohhhhhhhh those branches, those leaves... my patience runs out just thinking about it.

However the camera is a help and has made a record of the undersides of various trees and other plants.

This tree in my neighbourhood has been adapted for its circumstances -

Turn around, and you see this climber, a proper subject in itself; it's got the right kind of perspective in the buildings and boxes -

To Kew, for noble trees and spring flowers

 A book swapat the station, how civilised!

 Small plants in big pots at the entrance -

 Shy sunshine behind dark clouds, and the Thames running hight and fast after the recent rain -

 A hornbeam, if I remember right - possibly this - or maybe not! But doesn't it have wonderful twisty branches, and dappled bark -

 This is an elm, a tall one -

 In the distance, magnolia -

 Coming to the end of their flowering, the pale crocuses -