Nude adorned with Mistletoe

2025 Copyright Douglas Stockdale –

I have always been fascinated by the form and shape of trees in the winter after they shed their leaves, leaving bear the underlying structure. For many years I have also thought that this might make a nice portfolio series, while my photographs might not be all that unique, as the composition is pretty straightforward, more in line with a series of nice tree portraits.

This particular tree is on my local walking route and I must have photographed it a hundred times as part of my ten-minute rule; try to photography something within the first ten minutes while out with the camera to engage in a different way of seeing, e.g to kick-start the creativity. On this day I was walking with the two grand-dogs, one of which is having doggy-dementia in his ripe old age. I noted how the morning clouds were doing a little wrap-around and the sunny side-light on the tree made a really composition, especially with a far tree echoing a similar shape with the mistletoe in the upper branches.

The composition above in conjunction with the recent Lenscratch series on art educators reminds me of a developmental incident that occurred while I was in Junior High School about how an educator can really affect one’s future. Growing up, I liked to draw a lot. So I was pretty excited to take an art class in Jr.High and we had the assignment to draw a tree. Cool! So being winter in Michigan, I decided to draw a tree much like this above one with the bare branches. Apparently I was a bit too much detailed and took much of the week to create my tree drawing, which did not please my art teacher. In retrospect, I think the hints were obvious when she was hovering over my drawing board and repeatedly asking me, are you done with that YET?? My detailed drawing came back with a really big red D- smack in the middle of my drawing, rendering my drawing useless, while showing my art teachers total contempt for my budding effort.

Hmmmm. Drawing like mine must not be ‘art’, thus I must not be an artist, and so I switched to a technical drafting class eventually becoming an engineer. Only in college did I find out about the artwork of Andrew Wyeth and Albrecht Durer. hmmmm. Art that looks like stuff I like to do.

Nevertheless, by that time I found out that my drawing interests had potential ‘artistic’ intent, I had just about finished my engineering degree and a family on the way. So drawing, painting and eventually photography became a side-hobby to working and raising a family. Sometimes I think about the what-if, while realizing that if I had become an artist, not an engineer-scientist, I might not have been there in the early 1980’s sorting out why and how AIDS was spreading and implementing the changes, that the NIH stated probably saved 275,000 lives by the early 1990’s (who knows what that number is today).

Thanks for reading my musings and maybe next winter I will work on this nude tree series again, because on my walk yesterday, almost every tree was budding out leaves. The yearly awakening and renewal of mom-nature. Gotta luv it.

Make every day an Earth Day

Doug

Oh yeah, the tree above does not look anything like my drawing of the nude models from my life drawing classes. That’s another story. LoL

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Artist book available:

 The Flow of Light Brushes the Shadow, an artist book from Singular Images Press, copyright 2022, $60.00 (CA sales tax for those residing in the USA) plus shipping expenses. Message me douglas.stockdale.artist@gmail.com