I love this little study of a tree by Nathan Fowkes.
Fowkes is renowned for his mastery of color but even in this simple grayscale sketch his keen powers of observation shine through. Look how he’s able to convey the weight of that tree and the structure of that receding branch with such a lively, fluid touch.
 |
Fowkes ain’t in the business of painting individual leaves with a 00 brush. He has too much admiration for the universal and ageless qualities of water, so he welcomes them into the picture. Note how he records his observations using a loaded brush at lightning speed. Water rewards his gift of freedom by imbuing his small sketch with some of its universal and ageless powers, making it far bigger than its physical size.
This technique only works because Fowkes is fearless about leaving the trail of his brush. This would be a far less significant picture if he’d gone back to clean up the edges. Fowkes earned the right to be fearless because he paints all the time, improving his gift. Many illustrators today are not so brave, and that’s a wise decision on their part.
Most of all, I love Fowkes’ sense of design. His composition choices are bold and imaginative: a defining horizontal stripe of daylight between a mass of leaves above and a shadow below, all glued together by that diagonal curling shape from lower left to upper right. And while we’re at it, who crops a picture of a tree with no sky behind it? The way Fowkes composes this image, our only knowledge of sunlight comes from those abstract, dappled effects on the tree trunk.
I find a lyricism in Fowkes’ paintings, and that DNA can be present in even the smallest sketches.
