You may have heard of ‘outside art’ before – but how about letting a tree sketch the next picture to adorn your living room wall? British artist Tim Knowles has created an amazing project to create Tree Drawings — images created by pens attached to tree branch tips!
The old adage that ‘nature does it best’ often applies to art and design undertakings, not to mention images of majestic wilderness and impressive tracts of open landscape. Consider also, mesmerizing examples of the Fibonacci series and the golden mean in both art history and organic architecture as well as biomimicry in contemporary design. But the notion of ‘nature as artist’, or rather as an eco-agent of sorts in automatic drawing, is definitely a new take on environmental interpretation. British artist Tim Knowles has set the stage for plein-air performance art with his poetic and uncomplicated Tree Drawings created by, you guessed it, the branch tips of trees!
Tree Drawings are produced using simple drawing tools attached as freehand extensions to the tips of tree branches. In collaboration with the wind and local weather conditions, calligraphic gestures and automatic drawing readings are recorded on paper. The amazing thing about Knowles’ Tree Drawings is the unmistakable signatures that each drawing reveals as an indication of the unique characteristics and even genus/species of a specific tree.
4 Panel Weeping Willow” (2006), for example, included 50 pens suspended from the branches of a Weeping Willow tree over four panels placed horizontally beneath the tree. The drawing is accompanied by a looped video of its production.
Tree Drawings are pure magic using only the purest art ingredients. Move over abstract expressionists, post-modern arborism is casting a deep, all-knowing shadow on you.
+ Tim Knowles
+ Tim Knowles/ Tree Drawings
+ Tim Knowles on Le Territoire des sens
Via Eco Art Blog
It might be more interesting to redo the pieces with different colors and on different days- hopefully catching a breezy day. Or a composite of different trees on different portions of the canvas- so you get the relationship of where they are growing -ie, this plant grows in the northeast corner, that one shown in the south west portion of the canvas grows in the southwest portion of the field, and so on. I really think giving the plants a color palette, are they dipped in paint?? would be more appealing.
Sorry, this is lost on me. I get the performance art aspect when playing a loop of the making of the accompanying canvas. But the canvas itself as art? Oh, please.
I’ve always enjoyed the long dynamic shadows of trees on a white wall before dusk
I kind of like that willow tree painting.