If Piet Mondrian grew bonsai………

Following on the Bonsai and Art topic, I thought we could do a shallow dive into some well known art and how it has dealt with the subject of trees.

I’m sure most people reading this blog will either know the name Piet Mondrian and or recognise his artworks.

He is most well known for his bold patterned, minimalist abstract paintings, most often formed in a grid, filled in with bold primary colours.

Whats interesting about his work is that he painted a number of studies of trees, or at least one tree in particular, an Apple (I seem to remember) in his garden.

What I like about this series of paintings is it tracks his exploration into breaking the tree down into its rawest forms. First by showing main branches and omitting fine twigs and working through a series of iterations to end up in pure intersecting lines, completely abstract but born from the original tree.

You can almost see how his eye is developing as his works progress and he starts to distil and see into the form to extract the raw structure of the tree.

If you haven’t seen these paintings I would recommend doing a google search and checking out a few of his tree paintings and studies. He painted many versions of this tree in varying degrees of abstraction which are very interesting to look at and think of how it might relate to a bonsai context.

A few key leaps in his exploration are in the images below:

When I look at these paintings I begin to wonder what the bonsai equivalent of each stage would be? I think Mondrian’s explorations explore many of the things we grapple with as bonsai growers.

• What do we omit?
• What do we focus upon?
• How much abstraction should we include?
• At what point do we lose the original intent and is this point the moment something unique is born?

All interesting questions to ask your self and think of how they apply to what you do.

I wonder what ‘bonsai boogie woogie’ would look like?