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A language of bough and root
The forest and rainforest here is mostly Douglas Fir Trees. They have a growth pattern heavily adapted to living in deep shady forests:
- Starting from a seed, get tall as fast as you can for 2-4 years. Gotta go fast, gotta find the sunlight.
- Each year after that, do the following:
- Start a new horizontal ring of branches (a whorl) right below the top of the tree
- Grow each existing whorl a little bigger by extending the branches
- If any branch is not receiving sunlight (because you are in a forest and your neighbour is shading you), starve it until it drops off
- If you feel any sunlight on your bark (because a nearby tree perviously shading you has fallen), grow weird crooked grasping little branches there (epicormic branches). get all the sunlight. GET IT. In this forest, we don't waste any sunlight.
- If you got LOTS of sunlight and good water, you can start a bonus whorl (a "Lammas whorl" - pretty rare).
So a Douglas Fir growing all by itself has the classic "Christmas tree" cone shape - it adds a new whorl at the top each year, and adds some amount of length to all existing whorl branches, so the branch lengths run smoothly from widest at the bottom to smallest at the top. They are, in fact, often grown in tidy rows and used as decorative holiday trees.
But they're normally trees of the deep forest, and the history of light and wind and space in the forest is written on their shape. They have a lot of personality: young trees are nearly identical cute little cones, but an old tree gets stranger and truer every windy winter. I worked for years in a research group studying forest structures. We worked mostly with Douglas Firs.
When I started cutting paper, I was faced with the question of how to simplify all the real world complexity of a tree - leaves, branches, bark, roots, fruit - into a set of shapes simple enough to be made with an Xacto knife from an index card. Like writing, except visual, trying to communicate the feel get the feel across with a few well-chosen lines.
I knew the vocabulary of the shapes of whorl and lammas and epicormics pretty well so I did reasonably well depicting Douglas Fir and friends:
But foundered when trying to produce readable versions of non-whorl trees, like this red alder:
It still kind of has a whorl structure, which is, uh, not at all this species' architecture, and the result doesn't look all that much like an alder. I lack the visual vocabulary for a simplified alder that reads correctly. It has too much rainforest-douglas-fir nature.
So I've been taking a traditional Chinese brushpainting class, hoping it would broaden my visual vocabulary. It's surprisingly physical and technique-based, like a martial art. Twist the brush to make the bristles form this shape, hold it at that angle, move it this way, no not like that, the energy is wrong and your marks lack chi. It's been great! Sometimes I mutter the stroke names to myself, like a video game character shouting the names of his moves.
Some (badly-executed by a novice trying them for the first time) traditional foliage forms:
Pretty happy to have a lot more shapes to write "Tree" with!
(Also, the classes are fun and brush painting is fun. It's not just about becoming a better cut paper artist.)
Took a crack at cutting Chinese-style trees. This is my favorite of the tiny islands my boat to work passes. It's not Clive Island, but I haven't figure figured out which island it is:
I'm pleased with it. The piece definitely has its flaws (mainly that I made the top layer of the island, which is covered with a pale moss layer, layer, an outline -- it's really hard to understand what you're seeing), but the brushpainting-style trees (grass blades raising their heads style and sharp point style) do actually kind of work. Technique synthesis!
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Nice brushwork!
I'll see if I can find that island on my field maps. Did that survey in the early Eighties but the bundle of maps is around here somewhere.
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I noted the point where ferry passes closest to the island to the best of my phone's GPS abilities, and it is 48° 41.991 N 123° 24.275 W, and the island is a bit north of that, off the shore of Piers Island. Alas, looking at Google Maps with better coordinates, I think it might actually be Clive Island after all, and I don't get to know the secret name of an island. :)
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though I'm about to post a couple more recent ones I like less well.
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How long have you been taking the class?
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I was so glad to read this tonight.
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I grew up around Doug firs and still adore them, so your description of how they grow was delightful.
Your art is also fantastic, and I hope that you'll create other things you want to share so that I can admire them as well. :)