LEAVES CHESTNUT Silkscreen
Designer : Blaise DrummondCouldn't load pickup availability
"I made the first of my leaf drawings about 20 years ago. Walking one Christmas with my wife Síabhra in Les Jardin des Plantes in Paris I began picking up some of the leaves blowing about our feet. Later back in the studio I made a drawing of them as a sort of record. In the years following it became a habit, making drawings from collections of leaves gathered on visits to sites of architectural interest to me in my work – buildings by Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe and so on. The most recent is a drawing of leaves gathered from the garden of Alvar Aalto’s house in Helsinki last summer.
In my studio this autumn, whilst working on other things, I looked out at the Paulownia tree in our yard. Its large leaves were beginning to drop like green napkins on the ground. Away from the tree I thought they looked so simple and so beautiful that I tried to record this in a drawing before they curled up and blew away. Leaves falling from other trees around our land in the following weeks then began to call to me too while I worked. Abandoning the spade, saw or wheelbarrow I would carry them carefully back to the studio and lay them out. A leaf from the Eastern Black Walnut that I grew from a fruit pocketed in the Jardin Botanico, Madrid on a visit to the Prado many years ago, or from its cousin the Persian Walnut that I grew from a nut picked up in the garden of a gallerist I was visiting in Salzburg. The Horse Chestnut leaf is from a row of trees planted outside my studio door that grew from seedlings I collected beneath the huge specimens that line the drive of my parents’ house. Raking leaves there one autumn, I couldn’t quite bring myself to discard them.
The only problem was that recording these things seemed to be becoming a task with no end. Once you were paying attention their elegance was irrestistible and they were all around. I was half glad when winter came and I could get back to other things." (Blaise Drummond)
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