Burgundy Drawings

Ammonites de Bourgogne, silverpoint, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

Poster for talk and exhibition at Noyers Museum

It is done – I have managed to produce 15 drawings for the exhibition at the Musée de Noyers! What a relief! I deliver them next Monday and the exhibition will run concurrently with the show I have hanging at the gallery at La Porte Peinte.

Preparing for an exhibition under deadlines is never a favourite occupation for any artist. However, some people do work best like that. I am not sure that I do – the results of the effort will be for others to judge!

What has been both interesting but also more complex has been the need to weave together a body of work that pertains to the ideas I put forward originally, namely the birth of metalpoint drawing in the scriptora of monasteries, where monks used lead to delineate the illuminations and trace lines for the script of their illuminated manuscripts. Combined with that history, I wanted to celebrate the tiny fossilized oyster shells found in the Kimmelridgian layers of soil found especially in the Chablis area and which contribute to the special terroir of those wines. I had picked up samples of these heavy stones when I first arrived in Burgundy last year, and they have led me on a fascinating odyssey.

Burgundia I, silverpoint, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

Tying the metalpoint’s history together with the fossil-laden stones was thanks to those industrious monks who in medieval times also helped to spread the cultivation of wine, as they founded the great monasteries in Burgundy. Vezelay, Fontenay, Pontigny: they are all centers of such a rich heritage.

Vigne de Chablis, silverpoint, 24 carat gold foil, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

Even the wonderful and mighty plane trees, such as one sees at Fontenay that was planted in 1780 by the Cistercian monks, ten years before they had to leave their monastery, was part of that long-standing monastic heritage that enriches us all.

Plane Tree Bark, silverpoint, copperpoint, sterling silver foil, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

The other aspect that I tried to incorporate into these drawings is the close links between Burgundy and ocre, one of the key pigments in man’s artistic endeavours since the earliest marks man-made on cave walls from Australia to Africa to Europe. Burgundy was famous for its yellow ocre deposits and only ceased to produce ocre pigments in the 20th century. By heating yellow ocre, red ocre is produced; the two pigments find their way into every drawing and painting imaginable down the ages. I used the two colours as tinted grounds for some of the drawings I did for this project. Since early times, some artists used tinted grounds for their metalpoint drawings, so again, I was following a long-standing tradition.

Shell Silhouettes, silverpoint, watercolour on yellow ocre-tinted ground, Jeannine Cook

Oyster Dance, silverpoint, watercolour on red ocre-tinted ground, Jeannine Cook

From the Vine, silverpoint, 24 carat gold foil, yellow ocre-tinted ground, Jeannine Cook

I loved finding out all sorts of things about history and aspects of beautiful Burgundy for this project. It has been such fun - the drawings have been the perfect vehicle and excuse for all sorts of new insights and investigations. It is marvellous when art and fresh knowledge can go hand in hand.

When Art opens Doors

Vineyard in the Yonne, Burgundy

It is always delicious when you stray into new areas of knowledge by chance. Preparing for my September show at the Musee de Noyers came about because of finding fossil-laden stones last summer and starting on a whole new drawing odyssey. That in turn has opened doors of fascination. I have learned a little about Chablis wines, the effect on their terroir from these minute fossilized oysters in the Kimmelridgian layers of chalky soil and the history of wine growing in that area of Burgundy, in the Yonne department.

Kimmelridgian chalky soil, Chablis area

Fossilised Oyster-bearing stone, Chablis region. photo J. Cook

Way back in time, wine-bearing vines were cultivated in the regions of Armenia, Georgia and Colchis in 3000-2000 BC. Their culture slowly spread into Europe. These vines were the survivors of devastating ice ages, when Europe was a frozen desert for temperate plants. They had only survived in one area, sheltering on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, protected from the northern and western cold area. After the Ice Ages, the grapevine began to spread again, and felicitously, the varieties of grape that colonized Europe were of high wine-making quality.

In the Yonne department of Burgundy, the oldest traces of wine growing were found on a Gallo-Roman low-relief carving of a harvester picking a bunch of grapes. It dates from the second century AD in the Auxerre region.

Bas-reliefof man harvesting grapes, Escolives-Sainte-Camille,Yonne, 2nd century AD

By 1323, wine was being produced in the Chablis area, thanks to the efforts of the Cistercian monks at the Abbey of Pontigny. Vineyards were steadily planted in the Yonne because the network of rivers and waterways facilitated the transport of wine to Paris. It was not only the monks in the monasteries who appreciated good wine!

Celebrating Grapes, column capitol, Vezelay, 12th century Ad. photo J. Cook

Before phylloxera devastated the wine industry in the late 19th century, the Yonne was the largest wine-producing region in France, with 40,000 hectares under cultivation. Today, there are only about 6,200 hectares of grapes in the Yonne, including about 5000 hectares of Chardonnay grapes grown in the Chablis area.

Vineyards, Chablis area

Just one of the doors to fascination that opened, thanks to my art-making in Noyers.  Next post to come, another area I learned about.