Rorschach test and Inkblots

Bright sunny days are bringing leaves out and those first bright green leaves are tantalising.

The hedge around the allotment is made up of beech, hawthorn and poplar.

In searching for the identity of the leaves I came across this great resource for identifying a great deal of our native flora & forna, free downloadable identity posters...

Discover the Wild

I really like the mixture of symmetry and almost symmetry and enjoy mixing paint to try and capture the vibrancy of the leaves.

As I am using cartridge paper I have made the fold first and smoothed it out, then applied paint on one side and re pressed the fold to transfer some of the ink to the opposite side of the folded paper.

I use this technique a fair bit, so it will reappear I'm sure, partly for my own reference I'm leaving this link here to the more sophisticated use of this simple method, Rorschach prints...

Rorschach

The vivid green evokes memories of a pice of work I saw several years ago in the V&A, London.

Breathing in the Beech Wood, Homeland, Dartmoor, Twenty-Four Days of Sunlight

Garry Fabian Miller is a pioneer of the contemporary camera-less photographic image. This work represents his return to nature after a period exploring abstractions in light and colour. The leaves came from several trees and were gathered over a 24-day period in spring. Each vertical row of nine leaves represents one day of collecting and printing. Their careful arrangement shows the gradual effect of chlorophyll entering the leaf to make it green, offering a comparison between this process and photography, both of which rely on the transforming power of light. More on his works in the link on his name in this paragraph.

And lastly for today as I gather together scattered thoughts, a short extract from Wildwood, while this extract is written about autumn it still resonates in spring... (p205)

Wildwood 

A Journey Through Trees

Roger Deakin

"It has taken no more than a fortnight for the entire mountain side to change colour...with the shortening of the days, the mountain is displaying its geology through the minerals in its leaves....The chameleon leaves are litmus to the chemical changes going on inside them. The tree senses a particular moment when the balance between day and night has altered..."

The paragraph details some of the chemistry going on in the leaves, water sustained chlorophyll makes the leaf look green by absorbing blue and red light from the sun and masking other pigments in the leaf with varying effectiveness. Fascinating to think about green tree leaves in more detail and that what we perceive is to some extent an optical illusion.