Drawing and Painting Trees

222 Pages·2012·19.62 MB·English

by  Adrian Hill

Frontispiece
STUDY OF AN ELM
From the oil painting by the Author

[This plate appears in color in the color insert between pages 76 and 77.]

Planet Friendly Publishing
Made in the United States Printed on Recycled
Paper Leam mor al www.greenedition.org
At Dover Publications we’re committed to producing books in
an earth-friendly manner and to helping our customers make
greener choices.
Manufacturing books in the United States ensures compliance
with strict environmental laws and eliminates the need for
international freight shipping, a major contributor to global air
pollution.
And printing on recycled paper helps minimize our consumption
of trees, water and fossil fuels. The text of Drawing and Painting
Trees was printed on paper made with 30% post-consumer
waste, and the cover was printed on paper made with 10% post-
consumer waste. According to Environmental Defense’s Paper
Calculator, by using these innovative papers instead of
conventional papers, we achieved the following environmental
benefits:
Trees Saved: 25 • Air Emissions Eliminated: 2,116 pounds
Water Saved: 8,754 gallons • Solid Waste Eliminated: 1,129
pounds
For more information on our environmental practices, please visit us online at
www.doverpublications.com/green
Bibliographical Note This Dover edition, first published in 2008, is an
unabridged republication of the work originally published as On Drawing and
Painting Trees by Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., London, in 1936. The seven
color plates from that edition have been gathered into an 8-page insert, which
appears between pages 76 and 77; these plates also appear in black and white in
their original positions within the text.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hill. Adrian Keith Graham,
1895— [On drawing and painting trees]
Drawing and painting trees / Adrian Hill.
p. cm.
Originally published under title: New York: On drawing and painting trees.
London: Oxford University Press, 1936.
9780486135854
1. Trees in art. 2. Drawing—Technique. 3. Painting—Technique. 1.
Title.
NC810.H55 2008
743’.76—dc22
2008021258

Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y 11501
TO
MY SMALL SON
ANTHONY
WHOSE DRAWING OF TREES
IS STILL
FAR FROM PERFECT!
FOREWORD
IT has been suggested that I should write a little foreword to Mr. Adrian Hill’s
book “On Drawing and Painting Trees”: and I have great pleasure in doing so, as
I have read it and find it practical and very well done; indeed my only doubt is
that as Mr. Hill probably knows more about trees than I do, there is little or
nothing that he has not already touched on. But I can perhaps suggest to the
student an attitude of mind in regarding them which may help him to pass on to
others the emotion that the trees themselves have aroused in him: it is not so
much the degree of skill which he may have at his command, as his judgment in
selecting, from the wonderful panorama before him, those elements which speak
to him—to get behind himself, as it were, and lose himself in the mood of his
subject: and, with the limited means at his command, to suggest the power, the
infinity of Nature, and the limitless beauty made manifest, in which he
participates. He must lose himself in the mood of his subject.
Although the limited range of the artist’s palette is utterly inadequate to
express the range of Nature, it is possible with it to express every colour that we
can see, and we can make up our minds on looking at a scene, what part it takes
in the visible scale: we can register, mentally, the depth of our deepest dark, the
brightness of a cloud, or the blue of the sky; and keep, as it were, within the
boundaries we have found, as giving us the mood of the picture. I think Whistler
painted his nocturnes on some such plan.
A fellow-student of mine, who had known Corot and used to go sketching
with him, told me that he used to take a square of white linen and one of black
velvet, which he would throw on the ground some yards in front of him, so as to
give him the key-note of his subject as between white and black: this perhaps
explains the general impression of truth which we see in his pictures; and it
seems to me that this truth to the mood of Nature is the thing to get hold of.
The sky undoubtedly governs all: trees, rivers, hills and fields all take their
places in relation to the illumination they receive. And these are all living and
moving things, subject to the endless variations of the light.
It seems to me that we must approach the study of landscape in some such
way. It is well that one should draw the tree and try to understand its structure
way. It is well that one should draw the tree and try to understand its structure
and complexity, but the student should remember that he is not so much
concerned with the representation of timber, as that for a time he has been
permitted to take part in the great moving forces of Nature, and to share in the
emotion so conveyed to him. If he can succeed in doing this he will profit by Mr.
Hill’s clearly thought-out and expressed views; and he will have done well.
GEORGE CLAUSEN

LONDON
June, 1936
PREFACE
IN submitting to the public this book about the drawing and painting of trees, 1
wish to warn the reader that I do not present myself either as an authority on
forestry, or as one learned in sylvan lore, but only as a painter and lover of trees.
It is my wish to share with my fellow students such knowledge as I have
acquired of a fascinating subject, because knowledge is almost the whole of the
secret of success, and because it can only be fully exploited in alliance with that
understanding love of Nature which is at once the inspiration of the artist and the
rewarding joy that the job is powerful to bestow.
In writing about trees, may I be regarded as a host who, in introducing the
reader to his valued friends, has the hope that the contact thus effected will ripen
with intimacy and develop into a lasting friendship.
If there is a “hither and thithering” tendency in the way in which the matter is
set out, it is because I have found in my experience that textbook tuition is
largely pedantic and frequently inimical to enterprise and originality; and that
the teaching of tree drawing and painting does not lend itself to any rigid system,
but can be imparted only in the form of suggestions, hints, warnings, and
encouraging asides.
Should I be charged in the face of this admission with the laying down of
strong views and the uttering of statements which appear dogmatic, I offer such
apology as may be extracted from the explanation that, if I did not feel strongly
on some matters, I would not have undertaken the compilation of this book.
The profusion of pictorial “references” with which the text is furnished is
attributable to the generosity of my publishers and, in a measure, to the fact that
I find it easier to demonstrate than to expound! The illustrations are, as it were,
the exhibits put in in support of the evidence. Concerning those which are my
own work, I would add that, apart from any artistic or educational merit they
may possess, the doing of them kept me happily employed, and what can the
artist ask more?
ADRIAN HILL