Gray Tree

Artist

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter who started his career firmly in the Impressionist movement and was strongly influenced by Pointilism and Fauvism, painting mostly pastoral scenes. However, in 1911, he moved to Paris and began experimenting with Cubism. Later on, Mondrian moved on to adopt Cubism fully.

Work

The work is entirely composed of shades of gray, and is a melded style drawing from Impressionism and Cubism. Mondrian makes use of many short brush strokes to piece together the painting. The painting appeared to me to be built just as much by the negative space accenting the branches as the wood of the tree itself.

Approach

I wanted to recreate the work in the same way it first occurred to me by placing equal emphasis on the foreground and background, allowing the background to create the illusion of more tree branches and accentuate the tree proper.

Product

The entire product was created in a vector graphics software (Inkscape), where I used rectangles and parallelograms of the same color of gray but two different opacities to create the tree base and the ground and sky. I layered the background pieces over each other in a way reminiscent of the original to create the illusion of branches and the rest of the tree that is not done explicitly in the foreground.

Reflection

I think that I captured the basic intent that Mondrian had - Gray Tree was his transitional piece to Cubism, and is a stepping stone between Red Tree and Flowering Apple Tree. I decided to take another step and move the piece further from Impressionism and create a more abstracted interpretation of the work.

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3 comments · Latest by Kevin Ramser

The documentation is thin, but adequate. It’s a nice composition, but you could have given more explanation of some of your aesthetic choices. Why parallelograms and rectangles, for instance?

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