Tim Knowles

Artist and photographer, Time Knowles is known for incorporating nature into his work and using it to play a major part in making process of his work. He uses nature within his work and the use of chance within nature and the environmental elements to create abstract and experimental drawings.

 One series of drawings by Knowles is the 'Tree Drawings'. These drawings were produced by Knowles using the movement of the trees in the wind. He attached pens to the end of branches on different trees used large white surfaces perfectly placed so that they cached the movement of the trees via the pen strokes created by the branches as they moved in the wind. For this particular piece in 2005, he attached 100 ink pens to a weeping willow tree in Victoria park, London and placed a circular disk under the tree to catch the ink marks. 

I think that the way Tim Knowles has used the natural movement of the wind to create drawings make the finished drawing more organic. The drawings haven't just been created by hand, the small marks on the paper that if were hand drawn could appear to mean nothing or bland , have been created using nature; in this case the movement of the wind and therefore I feel that it gives this particular type of drawings more depth. I really like how experimental the drawing are and how unpredictable the process is in creating them. 

Tim Knowles also created a set of 'Balloon Drawings', these consisted of drawings produced by a pen suspended below a helium filled balloon drawing onto a slow moving roll of paper. The drawings produced can be up to 24 meters long as they plot the wind movements over a period of 24 hours. Knowles produced these balloon drawings on each of the highest mountains in England, Scotland and wales; Mount Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Scafell Pike. 

With these set of drawing I feel that they  are more structured and controlled than the Tree Drawings because some of his balloon drawings were in conjunction with weather reports and were more of a purposed and man made process with the mechanical  paper and contraptions used to create the drawings as apposed to the simplicity of a canvas and the wind in the tree drawings. However I still like the experimentation that has gone into the work and the fact that no two drawing will be the same.