Unencumbered

 

3/11/23 Roosevelt neighborhood

3/4/23 Ravenna neighborhood

Speaking of trees, Kathleen Moore’s class has put trees on my mind, front and center (not that they are ever too far from there while I’m urban sketching). Winter is an ideal time to study and appreciate the branching structure of trees fully visible without their leaves. She warns us to avoid what she calls “spaghetti branches” – the tendency for trees to look like a tangled mess of curly branches when we fall into unconscious scribbling as we draw. If we observe closely, she says, we’ll see that branches may look curved from a distance, but their growth structure is a series of “elbows and knees” (another Kathleenism) with nodes instead of joints. Tree limbs look more natural if they are drawn as straight line segments.

Trunks, too, can be appreciated more easily in winter because we’re not distracted by the full crown of leaves the rest of the year. I always love observing and drawing the lumpy bumps, often covered with moss, on some trunks.

When trees are personified, they tend to be described as regretful about losing their leaves each fall and being bare all winter. But as I was sketching the tree at the top of the page, I started wondering: What if trees look forward to showing off their lean, strong bodies without the encumbrance and weight of all that foliage?