In "Religion of Trees" on Monday we spent some time discussing what we've been doing with our drawing. Students said the practice of the drawing which ends each of our classes has become a sort of ritual, and I post all the images faithfully to our
Instagram page, but we hadn't thought about what it all adds up to. I told them that our 110+ images had moved beyond being little root tips to form a root plate, but what do we want to build from it? They seem happy to discover each other's perspectives, and are excited that word about the Instagram page is getting around, but I think there's more to do. I'm not sure we're quite getting at what initially inspired the drawing - engaging, responding to, relating to trees in a non-verbal way.
So in the coming weeks I'm thinking of some more involved drawing sessions. For instance, in one we will plant ourselves (heh) in front of a tree and draw it, looking only at the tree, not the drawing. (This was a practice Katie Holten introduced me to at Tree Wonder
last year.) In another, just to free our pencil tips, we might draw in a single line, never lifting the pencil from the page. More ambitiously, we might pay attention to all the twists and turns in a branch, realizing that many are places where a branch was cut or dropped. That came to me today, when we went to Jefferson Market Garden and I found myself drawn to a very contorted branch, very much the work of an artist-pruner. (My jerky drawing is in the spread above.) Most street and park trees are shaped by pruning after pruning, and learning to see this will be important for the class - see and
feel it, through drawing. If we had a forest nearby we might notice that trees in the wild sport lots of phantom branches too - maybe we could connect it back to the phantomful
tree of life!
So in the coming weeks I'm thinking of some more involved drawing sessions. For instance, in one we will plant ourselves (heh) in front of a tree and draw it, looking only at the tree, not the drawing. (This was a practice Katie Holten introduced me to at Tree Wonder last year.) In another, just to free our pencil tips, we might draw in a single line, never lifting the pencil from the page. More ambitiously, we might pay attention to all the twists and turns in a branch, realizing that many are places where a branch was cut or dropped. That came to me today, when we went to Jefferson Market Garden and I found myself drawn to a very contorted branch, very much the work of an artist-pruner. (My jerky drawing is in the spread above.) Most street and park trees are shaped by pruning after pruning, and learning to see this will be important for the class - see and feel it, through drawing. If we had a forest nearby we might notice that trees in the wild sport lots of phantom branches too - maybe we could connect it back to the phantomful tree of life!