Daily Doodles, My New Practice

Daily doodles # 1

I was entranced when I watched John Franzen drawing lines in this YouTube video: Each Line, One Breath.  What an imaginative leap to do line drawings so contemplatively that the strokes become a meditation.  I was inspired to use line drawing as my own meditative practice, one that I will call “Daily Doodles.”  I don’t know whether I will be able to sustain a daily doodles practice, but it’s a new month, and on day one I am motivated to at least attempt it.

For my first daily doodle, I drew on a page I ripped out of a New York Times Magazine.

I could draw and paint trees for years and years and never get to the bottom of their mystery and allure.

“Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?”
— Walt Whitman, from “Song of the Open Road”

John Grade, ‘Middle Fork’ on display at the Seattle Art Museum

Here is another artist’s impression of tree art:  John Grade’s suspended sculpture of a tree currently on display in the atrium of the Seattle Art Museum.  It’s a cast of a 140-year-old Western Hemlock from the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River.

And this week I fell in love with another “tree artist,” Donna Leavitt, who draws with graphite pencil the intricate shadings and textures of the bark of immense trees.  Her large works are collages of smaller sheets of paper. I saw these on display at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s “Revering Nature” exhibit:

Donna Leavitt, ‘Majesty,’ 2016

Donna Leavitt, ‘Thrust,’ 2012

Donna Leavitt, ‘The Sentinel,’ 2010

I’m falling in love with images of trees.  Imagine how captivated I can become with the real, live trees around me.