Art's gifts

Creating art is such a complex affair in itself, but there are other wonderful aspects that are often pure gifts to the artist. 

Every artist knows about the melting away of time when you are painting, drawing or creating in any medium.   The utter absorption, the falling away of other concerns and interests, the all-consuming demands of concentration - they are all part and parcel of art-making.

There are other gifts, I find, that make life more coherent, more enjoyable when I am able to spend time making art.  Somehow, miraculously, I seem to be far more efficient in the other aspects of life - the housekeeping, the cooking, the general functioning of everyday life.  There is more coherence to everything and the use of time becomes more orderly.

Another wonderful aspect of art for me is when I manage to go off and spend time plein air.  I spent a magical day this weekend, buried in the fascinating interface between salt marsh and oyster shell-rimmed high ground, the domain of cedars and live oaks, the home of fiddler crabs, herons and gulls. 

Coastal Cedars, graphite, Jeannine Cook artist

I was drawing for the Drawing Marathon, organised by the Women's Caucus for Art of Georgia, WCAGA, together with two friends.  It was a day of drawing, drawing, drawing, despite the heat and bugs. And here too, the gifts came in abundance as I lost myself in the complexities of cedar trees and patterns of bark.  Gifts like the whirring of wings as tiny ruby-throated hummingbirds hovered by me to inspect, the high-pitched trills of an unseen warbler, the keening cry of an osprey high, high above in sunlit heavens.  In between these sounds, utter silence, until a gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the trees around me or one of my companions walked past, the dry leaves crackling.

Cedar Swirls, metalpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

These are gifts that nourish, calm and reorder.  Granted, they are not to everyone's taste, particularly for city dwellers who may not know or care about such aspects of the natural world.  Some of the gifts require the quiet of art-making to show themselves. Yet they make a case, I believe, for us all to ensure that the natural world remains protected enough that we can spend time outside, away from the hurly burly of our usual electronic-driven, hustling daily life.  Only then will such gifts be given to us as artists, along with countless other lovers of the outdoors.

Celebrating Drawing

I always love it when out of the blue, one learns of the celebration of the art of drawing.

Just a small entry in today's Spanish papers, but a good piece of news for all of us who think that drawing is just as important as painting. Miquel Barcelo, the highly successful artist from Mallorca, has just been awarded the Penages Award for Drawing from the Mapfre Foundation in Spain. In his acceptance speech, he talked of the fact that he finds that, " Es gracioso pensar que la pintura ha muerto y el dibujo no" -explicó en referencia a aquellos que dan por muerto este arte-. Como si muere Dios pero la Virgen María siguiese viva" ( a quote from the Diario de Mallorca, that it is somewhat ironic to think that painting has died whilst drawing survives, as if God had died but the Virgin Mary remains alive). He received the award in Madrid, with Princess Elena present at the ceremony.

Barcelo's drawings and etchings are indeed a delight with their fluid ease and grace.

Marche de Shange, la Jupe Verte (the Green Skirt),  mixed media, 2000, Miguel Barceló (image courtesy of the website of Paola Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co)

Barceló has spent a lot of tiime in Africa, especially in Mali, and his images capture the essence of Africa.

This 1999 etching is from his series of works from the Balearic island of Lanzarote, entitled Lanzarote XXV, courtesy of ArtNet.

This is another of the Lanzarote series, a wonderful depiction of dogs.

I delight when an artist celebrates drawing as does Miquel Barceló. He inspires us all to keep drawing.

Drawing

One of the nice aspects of the contemporary art world is how drawing is thriving.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when I started seriously learning of the American art world, draughtsmen and women seemed to have a rather thin time. It was a very rare connoisseur, especially in the United States, who either knew much about drawing media or appreciated drawings for the sake of drawings. The Drawing Center in New York, for example, was founded in 1977. Interestingly, it claims in its mission statement still to be the only not-for-profit fine arts institution in the country to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.

Few young artists were taught to draw - it was not really considered necessary, it seemed. Life drawing was the domain of the few, and eye-hand coordination skills were seldom talked about. The Natural Way to Draw, Nicolaides' now-famous book, completed after his death by a friend and student,Mamie Harnon, was little known, I learned. Silverpoint drawing was virtually unknown - there were very few artists using this medium.

Slowly, slowly, there has been a groundswell in the drawing world. A few exhibitions here and there, more and more institutions, like the Arkansas Arts Center, seriously collecting contemporary works on paper which were mostly drawings in different media... more courses taught. For silverpoint, there was the seminal exhibition in 1985, curated by Dr. Bruce Weber, at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Fl, called The Fine Line: Drawing with Silver in America.

Now, there is a wonderful change. Not only are there regularly Master Drawing exhibits around the country, but there is a great deal of interest generated by the institutions famed for their drawing collections, ranging from the National Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Morgan Library in New York. Courses are widely offered, magazines devoted to draughtsmanship. Galleries are more willing to show contemporary drawings. You know there is wide acceptance of an art form when art fairs begin to focus on it. For instance, this is the sixth year that the fair, "Master Drawings New York", is being held across twenty blocks of New York's' Upper East Side, for nine days , as of 20th January. Its co-founder, Crispian Riley-Smith, is quoted in this month's Art+Auction magazine, as saying, "Drawings are quite intimate, and people need to take their time to look at them."

Another indication of how widespread is the acceptance and practice of the many drawing media are now is to glance through one the the art catalogues that land in one's mail box (surprisingly in today's on-line commercial world!). Jerry's Artarama, for example, has 51 pages in its "Drawing" section, and that does not include any of the pages devoted to Paper (which constitutes another 48-odd pages....). The total catalogue has some 560 pages for everything, from paint to frames... so you can judge how important drawing has become to the purveyors of art materials.

As with every skill that becomes more widespread and more accepted, there is a flowering of ideas, of innovations and approaches. New materials used, fresh combinations of media, different ways to express oneself - the state of drawing is vibrant and healthy. What fun and how wonderful to see this happen. A good omen for 2012.

Simplicity in Art

It is thought-provoking for every artist to see Albrecht Dürer's statement that "Simplicity is the greatest adornment of art". In some ways, it is a bit ironic for Dürer was perfectly capable of making complex, crowded works of art, especially his woodcuts.

Hands of an Apostle, Albrecht Dürer,  (image courtesy of GraphischeSammlung Albertina).

Nonetheless, the image that of course comes first to mind when I read his remark is his super-famous Hands of an Apostle, a grey and white drawing on his favourite blue paper. This drawing was done in preparation for the Frankfurt church altarpiece that Jakob Heller commissioned him to paint in 1508. This is indeed a devastatingly simple drawing in one sense, but look at the rendering of the skin texture, the way Dürer conveys the gentle meeting and touching of the finger tips, as well as the effort of keeping the hands together, despite their weight. The blue paper used, "cartaazzurra", was a new enthusiasm for Dürer; he learned about it when he went in 1507-08 to Venice. Artists in Northern Italy had been using it since 1389, and Venetian artists favoured it because it allowed them to use wonderful chiaroscuro effects.

Twelve-year Old Christ, drawing, Albrecht  Dürer (image at right courtesy of the GraphischeSammlung Albertina).

He was using this paper again for this study of the Twelve-year Old Christ, an extraordinary, sensitive and yet very straightforward drawing.

Dürer continued to use this paper and took a goodly supply of it back home to Northern Europe. I remember reading somewhere that when he ran out of it, he went to great lengths to find alternative blue papers. This drawing of the Arm of Eve was again, a very simple, powerful drawing Dürer did on blue paper in 1507.

Arm of Eve, drawing on blue paper, 1507l Albrecht Dürer  (image courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art)

I think that it is a real discipline for each of us, as an artist, to try to simplify our work, to distil it to its essence, not to dilute and maybe obscure the message. There is always the temptation to add in more detail, more complexity. When you think of it, however, that a simple study, drawn 503 years ago on a small piece of blue paper, can remain so memorable, so vivid, so powerful is a total confirmation of Dürer's statement about simplicity being the greatest "adornment of art".

The Process of Discovery

When artists embark on a creative venture, particularly one that uses Nature as its springboard, a process of discovery is often necessary.

Take, for example, a tree that may be inspiring a sculptor, a photographer, a draughtsman or a painter. Unless the artist already knows that tree very well, he or she will need to study the tree to learn of its characteristics. Height, form of growth, girth, type of leaf and bark, its flowers and seeds, its general look that identifies it as an oak, a cherry tree, or a poinciana. Only after learning about that particular tree can the artist move on to creating art that evokes it, in some form. By finding out about the tree, you can then decide what to depict, what to emphasise, what to eliminate, how to weave the fruit of your discoveries into a composition, a work of art. In essence, the process of discovery allows one to distill some order out of the seeming chaos in front of one's eyes.

For a painter or draughtsman/woman, small thumbnail sketches are one passport to imposing some order on one's discoveries. Frequently, when one is working en plein air, there is such an abundance of information pouring into one's brain that it is overwhelming. Translating all those discoveries of form, light, pattern, whatever... into a coherent composition is daunting. So small, quick studies, trying out compositions, seeking to simplify shapes and strengthen light patterns and passages. introducing repetitions and contrasts, are a way to further the process of discovery.

These studies don't take very long, one can try out lots of versions, in any medium, and each one helps further to refine what one is trying to say. They are also a form of shorthand note-taking, helping to catch fleeting light or shapes, or sorting out complex aspects. I find that they are especially valuable before I launch into a silverpoint drawing, because they can save me lots of troubles, given that silverpoint precludes any alterations or erasures.

Thumbnail drawings of landscape (Image courtesy of Marion Boddy-Evans. (Licensed to About.com, Inc.)

Since I have never scanned any of the thumbnail sketches from my drawing books, I am indebted to other artists for allowing me to illustrate ways of using thumbnail sketches. Above is an example of small exploratory drawing/paintings which use knowledge already absorbed from the landscape to determine which is the best way to proceed.

Park Sketches, George Bumann

These thumbnail drawings are done by George Bumann, a noted wildlife sculptor living in wild and beautiful Montana. The studies were apparently done on a visit in 2009 to Yellowstone National Park. Eloquent shorthand, they show how his knowledge of those landscapes, born of multiple discoveries and observations, helps define his art. I am grateful to him for such illustrations.

Because an artist has taken the time and made the effort to discover what it is that makes a subject notable, beautiful, interesting, relevant... the resultant distilled knowledge becomes a passport to making good art, art that rings true without having to be a faithful reproduction of what is being viewed. As the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, once remarked, "All good and genuine draughtsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature."

For that picture to be inscribed in the mind, there needs first to be a process of discovery.

The Test of Time

How often do images of artwork remain with one long after going to the exhibition? I always find it to be a good test of how much I like a piece of art, how much it has spoken to me, and how it has become embedded in my mind.

I was thinking about this aspect of viewing art in relation, for instance, to the Summer Exhibition 2011 at the Royal Academy in London. I went to see this huge show in early June - it stays up until 15th August. Now, nearly six weeks after I saw the exhibition, I find that there are only a few of the thousand-plus works of art that remain fresh in my mind and still interest me. Naturally, as I invariably find, the art I like is seldom illustrated in any catalogue (let alone postcards in a museum)! So it is even more an acid test that I need to remember the artwork entirely without prompts, save for any notes or quick drawings I might have made at the time.

The RA Summer Exhibition, a selling exhibition, is a giant affair, with eminent Academicians in charge of hanging different rooms. Christopher Le Brun was the show's main co-ordinator; he operated under the thesis, "There are two ways of showing paintings. One is the classic orthodox hang with lots of space around every single piece. But here it's like a battle of the paintings - forty big pictures on one wall alone!" By contrast, Michael Craig-Martin, who curated another room, went in another direction. He explained, "Normally, the Royal Academicians are hidden among everyone else. I wanted to show their range and quality by focusing for the first time on RAs only, because there are lots of new ones and nobody quite realises that they have all arrived here."

Photographs, paintings, etchings and other prints, artist's books, architectural renderings and models, sculpture, drawings - the 1117 works gave everyone a taste of today's art. You need a few hours or several visits properly to absorb the diversity, quite apart from having to navigate the crowds which ebb and flow according to the hour. It makes the test of time even more demanding, in fact. But as I remember back, some works remain to delight me.

Frederick Cuming's large oils were a delight of subtle atmospherics, whose titles, "Crescent Moon and Sea" "Clouds Evening, Camber", "Clouds and Reflections" or "Dawn Garden, Frost" tell of his interest and skills in conveying almost abstractions that evoked northern climes. Later, I found his silkscreens, "Etna" and "Thaw", and promptly fell for them!

May Evening, Crescent Moon,  Fred Cumming, oil on board. (courtesy of the Artist)

Winter Sea Camber 14, Fred Cumming , oil on board (courtesy of the Artist)

At the other end of the spectrum, a warm evocative abstraction in reds, "Window Screen Ajanta" took one far to the tropics - it was an oil by the late William Baillie. I have to say it was positively miserably hung, and almost impossible to view - shame on the RA for such a disservice to the artist.

In between, of course, there were the large and dramatic, the small and delightful, the ugly and strident, but more importantly, the gems. One, for me, was Edmund de Waal's "Untitled, 2011" white lacquered cabinet, hung on the wall, with clear laminated glass, containing 70 diminuitive celadon and white vessels. Discreet and elegant, interesting and evocative of so much history eastern and western in the ceramics world, I was not surprised that it was already sold. The other reason for my pleasure at seeing it was that the artist is also the author of one of the best books I have read for ages, "The Hare with Amber Eyes".

Another series of eight drawings, "Marks on the Edge of Space" were a fascinating use of conte, graphite and mylar by Ann Christopher RA. Layers, stainless steel rivets to attach them, use of shadows to evoke water, fields of grass, trees – so many plays of tone and shape to delight. Very sophisticated, lovely work.

THE LINES OF TIME -15, Pastel / graphite / crayon, Ann Christopher (courtesy of the Artist)

THE LINES OF TIME -20, Pastel / graphite / crayon , Ann Christopher (courtesy of the Artist)

THE LINES OF TIME -21,  Pastel / graphite / crayon, Ann Christopher (courtesy of the Artist)

There was another delight in the drawing section - a silverpoint. Small and quiet in its faintness, it was a lovely portrait, "Dulcie" by Dylan Waldron. Marvellous to find another silverpoint artist!

Dulcie, silverpoint, Dylan Waldron

Of course there were many other stimulating or beautiful works of art at the RA. Nonetheless, the artworks which have stood the test of time for me and that come first to mind are, as I have mentioned above, but a handful. Of course, that is just my personal selection: vive la difference is definitely the operative phrase at a show like the RA Summer Exhibition. It is worth going to the exhibition if you are in London, for it is a good way of testing the pulse of a wide selection of British artists.

Connecting the Dots - again!

A few months ago, I read the dense and absolutely fascinating book, "The Discovery of France" (with the additional title in the States of "A Historical Geography") by Professor Graham Robb of Oxford University. It is the most amazing work - the result of many years of research and some 14,000 miles cycled through France on his voyages of discovery. Graham Robb shows how the cohesive nation of today, "la belle France", was far from being either cohesive or civilised until very recently, really until the 19th century. Paris was an island of learning, culture and enterprise in a sea of very primitive, divided groups of people who had little concept of belonging to a nation and who, for the most part, did not even speak French until well after the French Revolution.

One of these groups, the Savoyards from Savoie, a beautiful area to the east of France, in the Alps region of Lake Geneva, had such trouble surviving in their inhospitable and highly taxed lands, that they would send their very young children to Paris for survival, of sorts. This had been going on for centuries, and these young children, virtually in servitude in many cases, would walk to Paris and there, they organised themselves into groups. They were especially famed as chimney sweeps because, being skinny small children, they could clamber up the narrow Parisian chimneys to clean them out.

Graham Robb tells a lot about these impoverished Savoyards, with their sense of solidarity, and their importance to their families back in Savoie to whom they would send money every year. Balzac and Victor Hugo wrote about the Savoyards, with their heroic attempts to survive, turning their hand to any job deemed unfit for others.

Standing Savoyarde with a Marmot Box, Antoine Watteau

Eventually, some 150 years ago, they progressed from chimney sweeping to another tightly knit category, the "collets rouges", the official porters at Hôtel Drouot, the most famous and oldest auction house in Paris. 110 porters, all Savoyards, have the right to transport, sort, store and carry all the auction items in the Drouot precincts. Recently, there have been some "irregularities" discovered and porters have been investigated for serious wrong-doing, something the French do not seem surprised about!

But the wonderful connecting of dots that happened again for me was when I was reading about the clearly fabulous exhibition currently on at the Royal Academy, London, of Jean Antoine Watteau's drawings. I had known that Watteau drew all sorts of contemporary scenes in Paris, not just the "fêtes galantes" of the Royal Court and 18th century French society. But I had forgotten about his drawings of the Savoyards. The Royal Academy exhibition apparently has eighty-eight drawings, divided into five themes, of which one deals with the Savoyards.

The Old Savoyard, red and black chalk with stumping, 1715, Antoine Watteau, (image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

The Old Savoyarde,, 1715, Antoine Watteau, red and black chalk (image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum).

These two drawings of elderly Savoyards, impoverished and marked by hardship, date from 1715. The old lady carries a marmot box, for the Savoyards would train marmots and use them for street entertainment in their quest for survival. Watteau apparently executed about a dozen drawings of the Savoyards in total.

Only such a master draughtsman as Watteau could so vividly illustrate the dire straits of the Savoyards that Graham Robb describes.

Mark-making - Playing with Fire

My artist friends in the silverpoint world are always guaranteed to surprise and delight with their creative inventiveness. I have just had a fresh reminder of this when Jane Masters, a fellow British/French import to the Northeast, sent me a notice about a show which she has just had at the Miller Block Gallery in Boston. She is a most successful artist with a wonderful resume of achievements to her name.

INstallaation View, Miller Bock Gallery show, Jane Masters

Entitled "Playing with Fire", this was clearly a most unusual exhibition and very well reviewed in the Boston Globe. This is an installation view of the exhibition she sent me.

Jane has, in addition to her wonderful silverpoint drawings, been extending her vocabulary to include mark-making by burning hand-forged steel brands on heavy-weight Arches watercolour paper. The resultant burnt drawings are wonderfully eloquent and energetic: the richly-hued burned marks and remaining smoke marks combine to form complex, sophisticated dances on the paper.

The images below are examples of this work.

Playing with Fire Curve, Jane Masters artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

Playing with Fire Circle, Jane Masters artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

Playing with Fire, Playing with Fire announcement, Jane Masters artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

The works  (Playing with Fire - circle) and  (Playing with Fire - Curve) are full 22 x 30" sheets of watercolour, while the centre image is a panel of four full watercolour sheets, or what is left of them after the creative and elemental forces are done. I am left awestruck, not only at the sheer dedication and skill of making such drawings, but also by the fact that beforehand, Jane makes the steel brands by hand-forging them. That is a labour of love and passion.

Jane shows the same passion (which I had seen in her silverpoints) when she also uses heated needles to pierce holes through the paper to create pinhole drawings that make me think of Victorian samplers, albeit with a lovely sense of humour in the messages she includes.

Jane Masters reminds me that there is such a multiplicity of ways to make marks on paper that become wondrous drawings. All it takes is creativity and passion. Bravo, Jane!

A Dedication to Line-making

There is a very talented and dedicated artist whose work is currently on display at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia - Curtis Bartone. His ability to make lines sing and tell dense, thoughtful stories is remarkable.

I first met Curtis when we both were part of the 2006 Luster of Silversilverpoint exhibition at the Telfair Museum, and we later coincided with the second Luster of Silver exhibition at the Evansville Museum of Arts, Evansville, IN in 2009. When I first saw Curtis' fine lines in his silverpoint drawings, I was impressed and intrigued, for he uses his skills to make thought-provoking juxtapositions of human activity and nature.

Curtis Bartone; Forbidden, 2009; Lithograph on Arches 88; 22 x 28 inches; Courtesy of the Artist

In his current large exhibition at the Telfair, Domain: Drawings, Etchings and Lithographs, which runs from February 4th to June 26th, 2011, Curtis Bartone pulls one into realms that challenge one's assumptions about life on our planet, while leaving the viewer marvelling at his skills in etching and lithography, as well as in creating huge graphite or charcoal drawings and luminous silverpoints. Every work rewards careful study, like the print shown here, entitled Forbidden. In each drawing or print, dense lines build up compositions of flora and fauna against backdrops that jar, challenge and provoke our concepts of how we humans coexist with nature.

Domain is an exhibition that warrants repeated visits. The printer's skill and the draughtsman's skill, allied to an intense, informed series of disturbingly beautiful yet troubling messages, are such that you can't absorb everything all at one visit. Go and celebrate a master "line-maker" and draughtsman. Bravo, Curtis!

Lines

When you think about it, life is full of lines. Power lines, phone lines, railway lines, the lines that define buildings and streets, cobwebs and even the veins of leaves. For an artist, however, using lines in drawings can give rise to many different philosophies and approaches.

For instance, Paul Klee famously and deliciously said, "A drawing is simply a line going for a walk". That statement goes along with his whimsy and imaginative approach to creating art. Just like his statement that "a line is a dot that went for a walk".

Paul Klee "Lines, Dots and Circles"

This is beautifully illustrated by one of his numerous drawings. It shows that whilst Klee was clearly drawing very intelligently, and often with deliberate wit and parody, particularly as the Nazis rose to power, nonetheless intuition and pure creativity flowed happily.

Another artist who allows the line simply to flow from her, without premeditation, is Christine Hiebert. Very widely exhibited and heralded for her inventive approach to drawing with media ranging from blue tape to charcoal, she investigates the nature and language of line. She starts a drawing on a blank wall empty of ideas, not using a pre-drawn sketch. She says, "The final outcome is always something I didn't anticipate. The process can be unsettling, but that is how I prefer to work. For me, drawing starts with the problem of the line, how to form it and how to follow it. In a way, it ends with the line too. The line remains independent, searching, never completely absorbed by the community of its fellows." (Except from her Davis Museum brochure for Reconnaissance, August 2009.)

Untitled, charcoal and rabbit skin glue on paper, 2000, Christine Hiebert, (Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum, New York)

I find her approach of visual thinking through drawing fascinating, because there is also another, more traditional approach to drawing. That is based upon seeing or conceiving of an image which the artist then proceeds to translate, through line, into an permanent image. This has been an accepted way of creating line drawings in Western art since the monks began to delineate their illuminations on vellum and parchment and their heirs, during the Renaissance, brought the art of drawing to great heights. Not only were the lines then used to explore ideas and make studies in preparation for paintings, but the artists also made finished drawings, line after careful line. Indeed, for many centuries, skill in drawing was almost predicated on little erasure, in silverpoint (that permanent line won't budge!), but also in red chalk (the bravura medium), black chalk, pen and ink and even charcoal.

Today, many artists are pushing the definitions of using line or making drawings far beyond those traditional approaches. Perhaps it is only fitting in a world where man made lines - the power grids, the computer chips, or whatever - predominate.

Wiki.Picture by Drawing Machine 2

When a beautiful drawing can be produced by Drawing Machine 2, using a mathematical model, the lines indeed go for their walk. Paul Klee would certainly approve, I am sure. It is good to remember that any approach to lines is possible, as long as we artists allow ourselves to be creative and free. That is my definition of fun!