The Silhouettes of Trees at Night

The minute I discovered these images from Art Young's pen and ink drawing series "Trees at Night" from the 1920s, I was completely enthralled by them. There has always been something about the shapes and movements of trees that has called to me.

In Maria Popova's article on the work, she says that "...Young’s imagination fell upon a subject both wholly natural and wholly original — the expressive humanlike shapes, states, and emotions emanating from the silhouettes of trees at night. He began rendering what he half-saw and half-imagined in pen and ink — haunting black-and-white drawings full of feeling, straddling the playful and the poignant. These visual poems, replete with the strangeness and splendor of nature and human nature, become the kind of Rorschach test one intuitively performs while looking at the sky, but drawn from the canopy rather than the clouds."

If you appreciate this work, I highly recommend checking out the beautiful art book To Laugh That We May Not Weep: The Life And Art Of Art Young.

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