survivor

On Friday afternoon as I tramped down the alleys to Swedish Motors to retrieve my old Saab, a survivor from 1978, I noticed this tall but gnarled tree on the corner of North Gay Street and Apple Ave. I was struck by how bizarrely twisted it looked, with large limbs missing from storm winds and prunings by the utility company, and wondered why I'd never really seen it before, despite the many times I've walked right past it. Like my rust scabbed and snaggletoothed car, it's another survivor. Something about that matters to me. Maybe that I see similarities in myself. Anyway, I made a mental note to get back there on a day when the weather would allow me to draw a picture of it. The image cropped up unbidden in my mind's eye over and over again for the next couple of days, but it was raining, or I was preoccupied with design projects that kept me in the studio, or ferrying kids around, or too darn tired to go out. But this morning, I heard on the radio as I drove my son to school that fog and drizzle would give way to another day of rain, and I figured I'd better just get over there and hope that I could work fast enough to avoid getting a sketchbook full of soaked and ruined drawings. I knew I would be distracted from my work until I did.

There was barely enough time to get this much, because the misty drizzle was slowly dampening the page I was working on, but then maybe that's not such a bad thing. Drawing trees is really hard. It's easy to become obsessed and then overwhelmed with every little branch and twig and the way they overlap and interweave, so it takes a selective eye to suggest just enough to capture their essential character. And really, weather notwithstanding, I like feeling some sense that time is short and brutal choices must be made. Sometimes.

Apple Street at North Gay Street, Marietta, PA, 8 1/4 x 11 1/2, Derwent Inktense pencils