Much thanks to Ms. Irene for the photos from our club meeting, and to those who have expressed their approval of the ‘Mesquite in Spring’ Pipe cleaner sculpture…At our November club meeting I shared the evening program with club and forum member Mr. Jay Nolen…Mr. Jay gave a very interesting and informative lecture on winterization of our trees here in south Texas, using his laptop computer with a neat little machine that projects the images on his computer screen to a much larger screen that the entire room can easily see…My part of the program was on ‘Bonsai Portraits’ Or ‘Photographing our Trees’…I had prepared several photographs to use in my part of the program to illustrate some points made in the 5 page guide I had prepared to hand out to all attendees…Unfortunately when I burned the photos to a CD, I failed to ‘finalize’ it and Mr. Jay’s laptop was not able to read the CD…Of course being no stranger to making the best of a poor situation on stage the program went on with apologies…Some of the photos I had planned to use were from members of this forum, but most of them were shots I had taken of the contest entry and a rosemary I have been working on for almost 2 years getting the root ball reduced and branches placed to capture the ‘feeling and essence’ of the Honey Mesquite Tree native to south Texas…I had taken both the rosemary and the pipe cleaner sculpture to the meeting…Before the meeting and during the break there were many questions and comments on the contest entry, so a portion of my program time was spent discussing the entry and the contest…
My sincere thanks go to all who participated, voted, and judged, this contest, and above all to Mr. Matt for having the insight to come up with a contest where all participants had equal opportunities as far as materials were concerned…A very special thanks also to Mr. Chris [Treebeard] for serving as one of the judges and donating the wonderful pair of ‘Joshua Roth’ root cutters…This is my first tool from the Joshua Roth Company, and after seeing the quality of these cutters I hope it is not my last…
When the contest was first proposed by Mr. Matt, I must admit I did not take it seriously…In fact I like some others thought it was a joke, or a test to see if some of the other forums that have copied contest from this forum in the past, would also use this idea…However, when Al Keppler posted his shopping trip, and the thread about ‘why’ this contest is such a great idea, I began to think a bit differently…Then one evening in the chat room Mr. Al dropped in as he sometimes does, and the conversation came around to the contest…Mr. Al said he planned to create the most perfect tree he could dream of…Perfect taper from the base and throughout all the roots and branches…I jokingly made the comment that I thought I would ‘try to break as many rules as possible’…Even before I purchased the materials for my entry I decided to attempt a ‘land and water penjing’, and after thinking even more about it I decided to deliberately create my entry with as many ‘faults’ according to the ‘accepted guidelines’ as I could and still have an ‘artistically pleasing’ composition…When working with real trees we are always faced with ‘less than perfect material’, and must adjust our designs to accommodate these things, yet when we view the work of others or even our own trees we consciously or un-consciously use these guidelines to judge the work…I must admit I was rather surprised when not a single mention of the many faults in the sculpture was mentioned in the popular voting portion of the contest…Perhaps it is due to this work representing a ‘Chinese penjing’ rather than a ‘Japanese landscape’ that causes one to not pay attention to the faults…I really don’t understand fully the reason, although I have for many years thought the ‘rules’, while being important for learning to create good trees, were not necessary to the ‘enjoyment’ of the work…
I am re-posting the two main photos of my entry along with this post so that those who are interested will not need to return to the contest thread to look for the ‘faults’…I will also reveal the more obvious faults that I used in this composition…
In these photos there are…bar branches...crossing branches…pocket branches...eye poking branches and roots...reverse taper...even number of trees...even number of rocks...and an even number of mondo clumps…
This was a very educational exercise for me, and I would most certainly recommend to those that did not enter ‘give it a try some time’…If I ever again teach a class or individuals on the styling of trees, this is an exercise that I would like to use…
Regards
Behr
