Many artists bravely paint or draw outdoors no matter the weather. I’m not one of them. I do sketch plein air, circumstances permitting, but mostly in order to obtain an impression or idea of a place. The details are then preserved in my cell phone or camera for later reference. There are some benefits to this method, apart from the comfort of creating art in a home studio. Not having the actual object or scene in front of me allows for some imaginative filling in.
These two large charcoal drawings were initially studies of tree stumps that I made in Iasi, Romania. One of the stumps had a strange rusty metal circle and spike attached to it. I could not figure out what its purpose may have originally been, but it most certainly had a threatening look. Was it a defunct instrument for hanging a clothes line? A public art work? Strangely enough, as I saw more such metal attachments to other trees around town it made the latter explanation possible. Some of these impromptu metal sculptures did seem to echo the particular angles of branches.
I drew the Romanian tree stumps while sitting on the grass until I grew tired and hungry, this effect coming on before my drawing was finished. The drawings weren’t brought out again to finish until my return to Orangeburg, South Carolina. Driving through the countryside in Orangeburg County, my husband and I chanced upon a newly cleared field full of torn stumps and exposed abandoned sheds and homesteads. Needing something for the background for my Romanian tree stumps, I made photographic notes of these and then later applied them to the Romanian scenes. Romanian stumps in an Orangeburg field. Who would even guess? The old canard that people are essentially the same throughout the world also applies to tree stumps.
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