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Show 37 things like proportion and contour. Still, there was an ornate brass doorknob on another page that he had drawn at some friends' apartment house in the Avenues and was pleased with. His line had caught the hard edge of the tooling and had given the suggestion of highlight on the contour of the knob itself, though the relief curlicues toward the bottom of the plate where his patience had given out did have the look of unraveled knitting. There was also a row of shaggy box elder trees on another page, which he had drawn from the balcony of the same house. The grooves that twisted and ran through the bark on one or two of the trees were not bad, and a few scattered lines across the bottom of the page had caught the litter of the trees on the sidewalk well enough, but the foliage depressed him. He didn't like drawing trees, because there was either too little or too much to select from, depending on your orientation, and his tendency was to avoid selecting and to sweep everything together in arbitrary curves suggesting billows of leaves stuck like cotton candy on the ends of branches, binding the branches together by concealing the smaller branchlets and twigs and the spaces between them. He knew that was lazy. He knew it meant his perceptions had shut down and he was not looking at the tree he pretended to draw. On the other hand, he had not been in the best frame of mind to concentrate when he had drawn these trees. The apartment house, for one thing, had made him nervous, and he had just wanted to get the row of trees down and have it done with. It was one of the old polygamist homes on the lower Avenues near the site of Brigham Young's grave, and had a small back yard containing a broken birdbath and an empty rabbit hutch. The yard was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence whose gate had rusted from its hinges and lay tilted against a sandstone carriage step. The house had been divided into apartments with brass numbers nailed to each of the doors, and a row of black- |
