Nature Drawing

Drawing nature is a difficult, almost breakneck task. Nature builds endless forms from organic and inorganic matter, and we bring order to that wild diversity by naming them — defining the species, the family, the relationships between them. It's necessary work, and I'm grateful to the patient observers who, over centuries, watched and recorded until we could begin to understand.

But my own looking is different. I'm not bound by the rules of scientific study. When I stand before the structure of a tree, a knot, a stone, a plant, my response is simple admiration — and I record it spontaneously, in a drawing or a linocut.

So I don't reproduce anything. I draw fragments of structure that belong to no species at all. And yet they could never have come into being without everything growing around me.

This is the root of my whole nature theme. An original drawing. Signed.

Jolanta