Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian was born on the 7th of march 1872 and died on the 1st of February 1944.

Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the Dutch art industry, is recognized for the purity of his abstractions and methodical practice by which he arrived at them. He radically simplified the elements of his paintings to reflect what he saw as the spiritual order underlying the visible world, creating a clear, universal aesthetic language within his canvases.

In his best known paintings from the 1920s, Mondrian reduced his shapes to lines and rectangles and his palette to fundamental basics pushing past references to the outside world toward pure abstraction.

His use of asymmetrical balance and a simplified pictorial vocabulary were crucial in the development of modern art, and his iconic abstract works remain influential in design and familiar in popular culture to this day.

The Grey Tree demonstrates Mondrian's early transition toward abstraction, and his bid of Cubist principles to represent the landscape. The three-dimensional tree has been reduced to lines and planes using an incomplete palette of greys and black.

This painting is one in a series of works Mondrian created, in which the early trees are realistically represented, while the later works have become progressively more abstract. In the later paintings, the lines of the tree are reduced until the form of the tree is barely obvious and becomes secondary to the overall composition of vertical and horizontal lines.

Here, there is still an allusion to the tree as it appears in nature, but one can already see Mondrian's interest in reducing the form to a structured organization of lines. This step was invaluable to Mondrian's development of his mature style of pure abstraction.

Firstly, I produced a quick live drawing of the branch. Secondly, I then used outlines to fill in the actual shapes of the branch. 

Finally, I added a lot of shadow and tone detail, using a 4B pencil  to create the three dimensional form and texture.