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.
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Fowkes ain't in the business of painting individual leaves with a 00 brush. He has too much admiration for the universal and ageless powers of water, so he welcomes water's qualities 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 water's power, making the sketch 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 is a dedicated painter, constantly 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.
17 comments:
Fowkes is awesome.
Nice analyis. I love Fowkes' art and teaching skills and I think you have captured perfectly what he aimed for in this painting.
I first learned about Fowkes here and have followed him for years. He's a genuine artist and a great person.
JSL
Fowkes' work is fascinating to me because he's applied so many digital/entertainment art techniques back to WC/Gouache. For example, in digital art, manipulating hue and saturation while maintaining value consistency is effortless, allowing for vibrant hue and saturation variations without compromising the clarity of the value structure. This tactic (while by no means new) is executed by Fowkes to a degree and with a finesse that is very rare.
When Fowkes' paintings are converted to grayscale, you'll find he almost never goes above about 4 or 5 values. Those shapes are always extremely clear and easy-to-read, verging on the cartoonish. Despite the commercialesque simplicity of his shape language, the interplay of hue and the inherent organic noise of watercolor make his work feel very sophisticated nonetheless.
I'm also interested in his use of super saturated notes. He hits color notes that are notably more intense compared to most traditional artists, more in line with Chinese and Korean entertainment artists. Otherworldy notes like this sky. I've wondered if he might be using fugitive dyes (Opera Pink et al), to achieve those vivid colors, but so far all the evidence I've found is that he's using a very traditional palette which is remarkable in its own right.
Anyway, it would be a vast understatement to say he's been influential. There are whole armies of Fowkes-ites now attacking gouache/WC paintings based on the stylistic innovations he's carved out. Lots of very cool paintings are getting made, but Fowkes was the original, and still the best.
Beautiful.
MORAN-- Agreed.
tayete-- Good point about Fowkes' teaching abilities-- that caused me to hesitate before I started pontificating about what he was attempting to do in a particular picture. But he also has a reputation for being kind hearted so I figured he wouldn't come down on me too hard if I got it wrong.
JSL-- I hope you followed my link to his instagram page.
Richard-- Thanks for your incisive reaction to Fowkes' special talents. I agree, and I don't know of any artist who has more successfully and honestly married the attributes of hand made and digital art.
kev ferrara-- I'm glad you had the same reaction I did.
Hi, David,
Very often we hear that relegating or omitting detail is a virtue in art, such as maybe implied in your comment
"Fowkes ain't in the business of painting individual leaves with a 00 brush",
and I agree, certainly over attention to detail sometimes freezes movement in a picture, thus taking certain temporal qualities from it. But I'd be interested in anything you or (anyone else here) might think or have to say about situations where more highly developed figuration is desirable in a picture.
Bill
(I mean, can it be formulated simply to what the artist wishes to circumscribe or draw viewer's attention to ? Not knocking this picture, which I agree with you on.
Or should there be a space for committedly communicating the fullness of the thing represented ? I feel that, typically or at least very often there is a deeper kind of communion between an artist and what he is observing, via very intricate sense involvement with the particular phenomena - that includes or leads via this mingling to non-physical qualities, which in turn the artist wishes to communicate, and that this very often needs to be achieved by recreating the thing observed - or, equally, remembered or imagined - with a degree of mimetic fullness.)
Bill/Anonymous-- I agree your dichotomy creates substantial issues. We are quick to recognize the downside of "highly developed figuration." The ratio of creativity to manual labor (painstakingly implementing tiny details) is much lower. It has become much easier to produce "highly developed figuration" with digital and mechanical tools, lowering their status. And (to be honest) the cognoscenti tend to sneer at dazzling realism that appeals to the tasteless herd of nullities.
Still, I think the devotion necessary for highly developed figuration, and the willingness to devote such a large percentage of your life to chipping away at those details, give them a certain undeniable significance. When I offer up extremely simplified pictures, like those of Milton Avery, they trigger outrage from some of the commenters who seem to think the painter hasn't worked hard enough.
So I agree there's true value at both ends of the spectrum. Hard to talk about these issues without actual pictures in front of us. I think it's time to put up some more examples of trees in different styles.
Al McLuckie-- Glad to hear it. I think that book is excellent, both for its images and for its wisdom.
When drawing/painting individual leaves (maximalists), most artists fall into either:
- Type A: They're just mechanically drawing hundreds of undifferentiated almond shaped leaf symbols.
- Type B: If they are painting differentiated leaves, it's overly reliant on photographic reference or sight-size/color checking and feels dead.
Type A and Type B behaviors are inherently non-poetic.
There exists a rare Type C, whom compose differentiated leaves that do not rely on mechanical strategies to do the heavy lifting.
I think anyone faced with skilled C-type maximalist painters are forced to admit that there's something inherently valuable, even preferable, in that art as opposed to the minimalist tree composers.
But when the majority of the maximalist work you're faced with are of Types A and B, it's easy and even rhetorically useful to ignore the existence of Type C maximalism whole cloth.
(By way of analogy, we celebrate Philip Glass's concision when compared with Metallica's artless runs up and down the fretboard, but ignore the existence of Bach altogether.)
Thanks for the reply. I was thinking about some of tne criticism given to the later painters who came in the wake of the preraphaelites, which I'm very fond of but can see the point of the critics.
And trees - in particular - as that was the subject for your piece here, have such an involving effect of people, we look at them shapes and spaces inside of them almost like a world in itself, and also at the outer shape, gesture and broad forms and the rest, so they seemed like an ideal example.
When rendering becomes a mechanical act, it stops being art, or something like that (Ruskin ?), I think that's nearly always true (but for Durer's engravings, maybe), and definitley true in the sense of type B you describe.
I'd be interested in any examples of type C. I'd offer Constable's trees in the Cornfield as poised wonderfully at both ends - broader concision and attending to particulars. Cheers
(Metallica - yuck. )
Bill
Anonymous / Bill-- I don't know if this is what Richard had in mind, but I'd vote for Rembrandt's "three trees." (But of course I'd vote for that for every category in every contest.)
Absolutely, and the Omval ( https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/359969 )
On that Fowkes picture - the way trees' capillary thrust towards the light, countered by gravity and winds, is transformed into something like a human gesture (which is more than analogous, 'we anthropomorphise rocks because we are partly petromorphic', etc.), all that and more is taken in by us even if we don't attend to it, and in the Fowkes painting this is very well replicated, i.e., accuracy in even fleeting impression.
Bill
People have been drawing trees for 30,000 years. It's amazing there is anything fresh to say about them.
JSL
I heard that Maxfield Parrish once said "only God can make a tree, but only I can paint one"
He was an egotist anyway, so this is not surprising.But he did paint a excellent trees, I'll give him that.
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