Piet Mondrian’s Tree Paintings
Exploring the essential balance and beauty of nature in search of a simple truth in the human experience…
With his many studies of trees, Piet Mondrian demonstrated his process of distilling the essence of beauty from naturally harmonious forms. He was attracted to trees because of their complex and often chaotic structure. Yet, at the same time they are balanced compositions that also respond to, and reflect, their environment along with the action of time. In order to better understand the underlying forms, Mondrian, repeatedly painted the same tree reducing the visual language he used with each treatment…
The Dutch painter produced an extensive series of tree paintings over a period of five years between 1908 and 1913. To begin with, he simply reduced the information he chose to represent. In much the same way as the Impressionists selected details to better reflect the experience of perceiving rather than evenly capturing the details across a canvas without any ‘editing’, Mondrian selected only the major boughs and left out the thinner branches and twigs. He still managed to paint a tree, with a clear tree shape, yet he was now closer to ‘essence of tree’ than ‘diagram of tree’.
He continued to paint variations on this theme, limiting the colours he used, eventually…
