Staring contest vs. 100 trees

I feel confident that I can argue with Treebeard. Mainly because he’s not here.

Venturing out of the comfterbubble

Isn’t that word so much more apt and punchy than the standard alternative: “Comfort Zone?”

The only problem is that the word is actually “comfortable” and not “comfterble” as it clearly should be. Same as Wensday.

But no matter how comfter the bubble may be, you can’t stay in one forever. In order to get anything into it, you have to go out of it.

For example: Trees made me really uncomfortable. They add so much beauty and life anywhere you see them. But, whenever I drew one in a comic panel, it inevitably took the form of a fuzzy green lollipop.

But what could I do when even the thought of drawing the staggering complexity of an actual tree was well outside of my comfterbubble?

I knew the “draw 100” challenge was a popular way to improve at drawing a specific subject, so I took on the mission of drawing 100 of those scraggly, complicated, and intimidating trees. Little did I know I wouldn’t be seeing my comfterbubble again for more than two and a half years!

Super-structure

I dove into the tangled madness of tree drawings and was completely overwhelmed. But even after a few drawings, some basic parameters became clear. I couldn’t possibly draw every detail of the tree accurately. I’d have to extract some simplified version of what I saw, so that a viewer could fill in the rest of the picture in his mind.

I would be like a sugar-maker, boiling down ten gallons of sap into one bottle of delicious maple syrup.

After a few more drawings, I discovered that recognizable structure is a shorthand for complexity.

Not too long ago, I listened to a recorded shiur of Rav Lopiansky shlit”a, where he explained that people naturally seek out structure.

We use structure as a convenient handle to grasp something that’s otherwise too big for us to hold. Like the way we can remember the words to a song because they fit into the tune and rhyme scheme, or recall a good movie, scene by scene, because of how they fit into the plot. (To be clear: Rav Lopiansky uses a book as an example. 😜)

Method from the madness

Sadly, most trees don’t present an obvious structure. Instead they present a mishkabibble of leaves and branches. But venturing out of the comfterbubble meant staring into the madness until I cracked the code… or just plain cracked.

Slowly I learned to recognize some of the repeating patterns and major shapes, and how to draw them. The better I got, the better I was able to present the simplified structure of the tree, so anyone could appreciate what I had seen without having to hack through all those brambles on their own.

I still go back to the green lollipops when I’m lazy, and theoretically, that’s just an extremely simplified structure that anyone could read as a tree.

There’s room for obvious structure, like a character with a perfectly symmetrical, average face, or little square houses with red triangle roofs. But for the sophisticated consumer (read: feinschmecker), those are predictable and boring. As the structure gets more complex, the work becomes more engaging. You have to put in more effort to interpret what you’re looking at, but it’s also much more gratifying. Like the “flow state” in video games - you have the most fun when you’re tackling challenges that are just at the edge of your capabilities.

Just right

I think that’s one of the superpowers of art and artists.

When you consume art, the artist has done some simplifying for you, but you’re also expected to do some of the work on your own.

Some will ask you to do the lion’s share - “chew the food” - on your own, and some will do almost all the chewing for you - like a mommy penguin, if you will. And, of course, there’s everything in between.

I think a good artist should have his hand on the knob and deliberately decide what level of distillation will make his work most enjoyable.

This also adds personality to artwork - I pick out certain elements of structure that speak to me. Another artist might have picked up on other elements. Someone looking at our works would see the same tree, but appreciate different aspects of it, depending what we chose to focus on.

And so, my dear Tree-beard: You’d be more wise to summarize.