Basho....''The from the pine tree - learn of the pine tree'' Not necessarily about pines but life in general but in essence it means go to the source to learn about it. eg; You will learn much more about pine trees or any other tree from the tree itself than you ever would from someone telling you about it.
During a talk a while back I showed these sketches to help illustrate the way branches are formed ( after studying a real tree down the road ) and especially those sudden changes of angle you see in the above art and in real trees. You can't use wire to create this. The only way is leader replacement after a hard cut. I think this approach hold one of the secrets for creating that wild natural angular image. It will probably take 3 times as long as a conventional wired tree. It's a sequence and the first one shows a branch formed in the normal bonsai way and the second sketch shows it twisted from the horizontal to the vertical and with some new lower branches removed or shortened. Any one of a million variations could be derived from this and you can repeat it again and again on the one branch letting grow or jinning off as you go - depending on the size of the tree of course.
