These three sketches were completed standing in a white pine off Keese Mill Road, overlooking an arm of Lower Saint Regis Lake. The day was cold with snow in the air, the sun was intermittent: excellent weather. The sunlight shifted on and off the gold of the tamaracks’ needles, and played on the other parts of the scene. This accounts for a line in the second drawing, where most of the reflections stop, as the area above the line was always in shadow.
I was motivated to draw the third piece by a quote from Aldo Leopold: “The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red, and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one.” The subject was also very nice.
The first piece is the one I like the best. The feeling of this piece is hard to express. The pale green of the lichen and its frail lines are contrasted with the gray and silver twig, with its simple and sturdy structure. The effect is very pretty, but there is more there.
The fourth and fifth sketches were drawn for the wild nature project [HUM 400: Nature and Art]. This was a damp day, although it was not that unpleasant, but unfortunately I was not well that day and sitting on cold, wet ground is not conducive to art or health. I drew number four after number five. It is a balsam fir twig that was on the ground where I was sitting.
Number five was drawn after sitting and wondering what to draw. I decided to draw the tree, partly because I do not usually draw things that do not have an end that I will include. I also feel that the trunk of the tree is a good, and overlooked, representative of wild nature, because it is the structure of both those nice views everyone likes, and of the community, living or dead.
