2 ten-minute sketches of the birch tree. This month's drawing experiment from my leader, Edward, is to hold a different idea in mind each time you draw the same subject. 'Time' was the idea this time. My subject is the garden. The first sketch was trying to catch the last few minutes of sunlight shortly after 8 p.m. The bush behind was bright yellow, while the right hand of the birch trunk was slipping into shadow. The tone and definition of the cracks and sculpted grooves of the bark shifted as I sketched. Glimpses of the sky beyond remained lighter than the foliage. The second sketch was a few minutes later and of the lower part of the trunk near the ground. The sun had set and the contrasts of light and dark had dimmed. But the geometry of the peeling bark was still pronounced and the fainter horizontal markings gave some sense of the volume of the trunk. This tree is probably 60 years old. I will return to this in pastel - as I did before. Earlier today my writing group met outside - 9 of us at a social distance. Our reading was www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-why-you-are-more-bug-than-human It was perhaps too good to talk - rather thann write - after yet another month of lockdown. We played a kind of charades with phrases and idioms and discussed animals around us and within us - and how we hunt and trap them in words. We told stories and then we wrote and shared. |