Botanical Art

Botanical art is enjoying a great resurgence in popularity and appreciation. The British, Australians and some Europeans had continued always to favour this form of art, partly, perhaps, because of the strong horticultural and plant collection/husbandry tradition. Kew Gardens and other important botanical gardens round the world had kept alive the tradition of fine art married to botany. However, with the founding of the American Society of Botanical Artists in 1995, this art form took off. Another decisive factor in this renaissance has been the enthusiastic and hugely influential support of Dr.Shirley Sherwood.  Not only has she collected botanical art all over the world and helped artists most generously, but she has now enabled Kew Gardens to have the world's first gallery devoted to botanical art, the Shirley Sherwood Gallery.  (I am proud to say that she owns one of my silverpoint drawings.)

Azaleas in March, silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist, Private collection

With increasing interest in botanical art, the ASBA has been organising important exhibitions around the United States. The Society, to which I have belonged for many years, has become more and more imaginative in exhibit themes and attuned to today's environmental concerns. A show which has just opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, demonstrates this: "Losing Paradise? Endangered Plants Here and Around the World" shows art done by forty-one artists from the five continents. The exhibit has already travelled to the Missouri Botanic Garden, the Chicago Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Garden.

Using the simplest of media - graphite pencils, pen and ink, coloured pencils and paint - the artists not only captured the essence of the plant but they document its structure, habit of growth, colouration and general characteristics in exquisite, accurate detail. Again, as with so many works of art done from real life, as opposed to photographs, each artist creates an individualistic interpretation of the subject matter, combining artistic skill with the energy and passion inspired by that plant. In the case of this particular exhibition, there was an additional energy. The Society posted the call for this exhibition about three years previously, so that artists all around the world could seek out endangered plants and help draw attention to their plight by the art created. What more enlightened role could art play!

The Magic of Art

Ever since man has been creating art, and especially for the last 30,000 odd years, magic and art are closely linked. Perhaps Marcel Proust said it best, when he wrote in Time Regained, "Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscape would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their own individual special radiance."

You only have to leaf through any art magazine or go online to any gallery website to see how accurate Proust was about the multiplicity of optics and voices displayed in art. Magically we are transported to other lands and other ways of life. We see faces familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy upon fantasy, different approaches to objects that we have never thought about before. A visit to a major museum proves Proust's point about the longevity of great art down the ages. The masters know how to combine passion, subject matter, composition, colour, technique and the elusive wave of their "magic wand" to create art that withstands the test of time.

Ellen Lanyon, an American artist noted for her wonderful juxtapositions of fantasy and reality, calls upon this element of magic in her art. Using nature, everyday objects and intertwining living creatures and technology, she advocates for ecological balance. Her approach is joyous. As she says, "I become the magician who can transform flowers into fire, create the animals out of the inanimate, and utilise osmosis and gravity to create an illusion. Artists have the powerful tool of the imagination to make everything happen."

Niagara,  lithograph, Ellen Lanyon, (Image courtesy of the artist)

The Persistence of invention, acrylic on canvas, Elle Lanyon  (Image courtesy of DePaul Museum and the artist)

Eagle Beak, Ellen Lanyon, 1985. Lithograph, 44 ½ x 30 ¼ inches. Collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

Call it imagination, call it magic, but so many artists spring to mind when one thinks about how art forces us to see other universes. Surrealist Salvador Dali is perhaps an extreme example, but Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko or draughtswomen working today like Sky Pape or Carol Prusa all have shown me fascinating, magical worlds I had never conceived of. And those are but a small number of artists that come readily to mind - we can all make up our own list of magician artists.

Art and Immigration

As an immigrant first to Europe and then to the United States, I cannot help but feel sympathy and empathy for immigrants, be they forced or voluntary. Uprooting yourself from your home surroundings takes courage, energy and faith in the future. I have, however, also realised that I am fortunate to have become a de facto citizen of the world, just as my mother and grandmother did before me, on different continents.  That state makes life infinitely more interesting.

Klotho Series 3 - Ethel Patricia Wright (my mother) - Yokohama earthquake to Africa,  silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

African Memories II - silverpoint-watercolour-foil, Jeannine Cook artist

As an artist, it also makes for complex influences that, willy nilly, show up in one's work. (Above, African Memories II). I think back to an interesting statement that Luisa Rabbiamade during her time as Artist in Residence at the Isabella Gardiner Museum, Boston. Talking during an interview reported in Art in America in June/July 2009, she mused, "In the past couple of years, I have been thinking about roots and the idea of carrying yourself as you travel. It is one thing to be the immigrant (to New York) and another to see others immigrating (to Italy). It gives you two points of view."

Mindful of the charged discussions swirling in the United States, all over Europe and even in places like Israel today, I feel that it is indeed true about the two points of view. But it is also true that in all the arts, cross fertilisation between cultures is enriching and stimulating. Each immigrant-artist brings to the new setting a heritage from which to draw inspiration, the sustaining roots that allow fresh growth in the adoptive surroundings. This country, for example, has seen enormous artistic diversity, thanks to immigrants. Think of John J. Audubon (from Santo Domingo), Willem deKoonig(from Holland), Arshile Gorky (from Armenia), ShirinNeshat(from Iran), CaiGuo-Qiang (from China), Louise Nevelson (from Russia) or Claes Oldenburg (from Sweden) as random examples.

Personally, I find myself drawing on my past roots as well as trying to absorb the world around me for my art. It depends on the moment, but there will suddenly be a stream that bubbles up, from some bye gone source far from today's world. That perhaps is one of the magical things about being an artist - one is free to use whatever inspiration or source seems appropriate. Just as with a tree, one's own roots are wide-spreading, branching from the primary root of one's homeland into a myriad secondary roots of other lands one grows to know. Those experiences, shared by countless millions around the world today, are valuable for the immigrants' adoptive lands. It is up to artists to give visual validation to some of these experiences.

Art's Accessibility

Back in March 2009, famed art and culture critic and enfant terrible Dave Hickey wrote a long piece in Art in America about "Addictions". In it, he said that "in the last two centuries, the opportunity to make good art and literature has continuously expanded. In response to this broadening franchise, elite cultures have striven to defend their domain by escalating the level of 'difficulty' demanded from serious art and literature. The larger the field of runners, in other words, the higher the hurdles. Two centuries of expanding opportunities confronted by an escalating standard of difficulty have led to this consequence: today, anyone can make a work of art that nobody can understand." He ended a long plaint about the opacity of many contemporary works, the suspicion that greets any efforts to explain such works, and even the dulling and homogenising effect of art school curricula with a plea to bring "the fire from wherever you find it to an art world that needs it."

František Kupka, 1912, Amorpha, fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), (Image courtesy of Narodni Galerie, Prague)

Amongst the proliferating world of blogs about art and websites promoting every imaginable form and aspect of art, there is a new endeavour which brings more "fire" into the public discourse about art. Today, PBS announced the launch of a new website, PBS Arts, to diffuse to new audiences their work on visual arts, crafts, and architecture.

It seems that the more the arts are "de-funded" by government, the more Public Radio and Public Television are taking up the challenge of informing the nation about artistic endeavours, accessible or opaque in nature. Awareness of what is happening in music, visual art, theatre, poetry, literature, crafts and architecture enriches us all, even if the coverage is, inevitably, only a small proportion of what is happening nationwide. Learning about the arts of today renders them much more accessible and interesting to everyone, negating to a degree the controlling influence Hickey ascribes to the "elite". There is another aspect of this wider accessibility: seeds are sown in people's minds which lead, later, to deeper interest and knowledge about the arts in many instances. More fire in the art world.

Embankment by Rachel Whiteread. Turbine Hall, The Tate Modern, Bankside, London. 12 November 2005

Art that alludes to the Sacred

Ephraim Rubenstein, a wonderful artist and fellow silverpoint artist, has just sent me the announcement for his forthcoming solo exhibition at the George Billis Gallery on West 26th Street in New York. Entitled Temples and Cathedrals, it is a show of large-scale mixed drawing media depictions of European Gothic cathedrals and massive Greek temple ruins. It will certainly be a dramatic and impressive array of drawings.

What I found interesting were Ephraim's concepts behind this body of work. In both the pagan temples and the cathedrals, he evokes the "magisterial quality of these sacred spaces". Scale, architecture, play of light are all devices used in sacred structures to impress and convey a sense of the presence of the divine. There can be few of us who have not been silenced in awe at the sight of the mighty harmony of soaring Gothic arches or the dazzling glory of huge rose windows enclosed by lacy stone. Similarly, Greek temples, no matter how shattered by time and man's depredations, evoke the centrality and the power of the gods in man's daily life by the extraordinary elegance and drama of columns, friezes, pediments.

Selinunte I (mixed media, 38×50), Ephraim Rubenstein  (Image courtesy of Artists Network)

Cathedral VII (mixed media, 38×50), Ephraim Rubenstein, (Image courtesy of Artists Network)

By playing these very different types of structures off each other in his dramatic monochrome renderings of temples and cathedrals, Ephraim reminds us of man's perpetual quest for the sacred. As he points in his press release about the exhibition, the metamorphosis of man's religious beliefs, from paganism to Christianity, is echoed even in the stones of the different sacred structures. Many of the cathedrals were built with stones taken from earlier temples. Another form of Sic transit.

Knowing how beautiful Ephraim Rubenstein's art is, I am certain that this will be an exhibition well worth visiting if you are in Manhattan.

The Power of Art

One of the most eloquent reminders I have met recently of the power of art to overcome even the most appalling of situations and experiences is the 1963 novel by the Czech writer, Josef Bor, entitled The Terezin Requiem. I found this slender book, republished in 2006 in French in the Livre de Poche edition, at Barcelona airport; it was a fortunate purchase. If you are lucky, I think it can be found in English, sometimes with the title, The Theresienstadt Requiem.

Although this is a novel, it is based on a true story. Josef Bor, a legal expert, was sent to Terezin, "the antichamber to Auschwitz", in June, 1942. Most of his family was killed in Poland, Terezin or Auschwitz. He was eventually liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, and in 1963, he published this book. It is about the Czech pianist and orchestra director, Raphael Schächter, who spent from November 1941 until October 1944 in Terezin; he was then transported to Auschwitz. During his time at Terezin, after eighteen months of the most determined and heroic work, he managed to put on a concert of Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem, with four soloists, a choir of one hundred and fifty singers and two pianos en lieu of an orchestra. To achieve that, he had to teach and rehearse with at least five hundred prisoners, because the Nazis kept sending off the singers to Auschwitz to be exterminated.

Image of deceased Czech composer Rafael Schächter

The book is a most beautiful and moving paean to the power of art to advocate for liberty and justice. Verdi's Requiem becomes the vehicle to assert the essence of human dignity, the absolute rejection of Nazi barbarism. Bor writes superbly, moving one through the incredible labours and odyssey of Schächter rehearsing and achieving the performance of the Requiem, which, as in real life, was ultimately produced - by a quirk of fate - with Eichmann, Moese and fellow SS high command in the audience.

Verdi's music is used to tell the story of the emotions, the suffering, the deeply shared empathies of the musicians. Aria by aria, the words, written by an Italian and rooted in the Catholic faith, are sung by Jewish prisoners as the ultimate resistance to their Nazi oppressors. Bor makes one understand just why this musical art can be so potent, so universal.

I don't think I will ever listen to Verdi's Requiem again without having in mind this beautiful account of music's redemptive, triumphant power in the name of freedom.

The Arts and Joy

I was listening to the BBC in the car today and heard a piece by the singer-songwriter, Tracy Chapman, talking of her acclaimed song,"Fast Car" and others. What I found interesting were her observations about the creative process being "very mysterious", in that she does not set out to deal with any specific issue. She apparently just sits down "for the joy of it" to create, using her love of music to develop whatever "inspires me". Although everything is autobiographical in some sense, she allows the creative process to evolve and lead her.

I kept thinking about the joy of the creative process, because of course, it resonates with me and every other artist in no matter what field. I could not help reflecting that it is indeed seldom that one hears of someone in business, finance or many other occupations who talks about experiencing "joy" in what he or she does. Perhaps that helps to explain why so many things go wrong!

For an artist, joy is an emotion that is complex, marvellous, fugitive and very precious. It is also highly unpredictable. Allowing time, space, quietness and personal happiness in one's life are all ingredients that feed into the joy of the creative process. Ultimately, for many people, creating is as simple as breathing, and as necessary.

Henri Matisse, Mimosa, 1949-51, Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on canvas (Ikeda Museum of 20th Century Art, Ito, Japan)

Dominant Curve, oil on canvas, Vassily Kandinsky,1936,  (Image courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection)

The Joy of Color, acrylic, San-T (Image courtesy of the artist)

From the perspective of someone whose mission it was to try and introduce people to this joy, awareness of the arts is key. Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said,"the purpose of arts educators is to create a complete human being who can lead a productive life in a free society." To achieve a greater respect for the arts, he felt that experience was the best path. He evoked sitting in a concert hall and being "moved to the deepest centre of your humanity", going to a museum and being "simply ravished by what you see".

Yet in order to be moved, ravished, uplifted, each of us has to benefit from fellow human beings who have experienced the joy and inspiration of creativity in some fashion and given us works of art. It is an extraordinary chain of gifts down the generations from time immemorial.

Annual Newsletters about Art

Writing a newsletter about one's activities in the art world is an interesting exercice, I have decided. For many years now, I have written one every summer, mostly just to touch base with my friends and art collectors. Many people who have collected my art have become friends, which is one of the nicest bonuses of all.

When an artist sits down and reviews what has happened during the previous year, it is sometimes instructive. You can assess clearly whether you are making an effort to put your work out in the marketplace and what the results have been. Measuring yourself against your peers is another important aspect of trying to grow as an artist: acceptance in shows that are juried or curated by respected authorities in the art world is always a plus, particularly for one's resume. But more than that, it is a benchmark in the quest to improve one's artistic skills.

A review of a busy year can yield clues as to what activities have been the most successful; it can also show up what lacunae may need perhaps to be attended to in the future. Outreach can take many forms, from exhibits to talks to articles in the press, or - as with this blog - on the Internet. All these can help foster the image/brand that you are endeavouring to present to the world as an artist. The philanthropic side of art shouldn't be forgotten either; art can help people and causes in many different ways.

Over the years, however, I have also realised that the personal side of being an artist needs also to be alluded to a little in a newsletter. Artists are human beings, with a personal life, and it influences hugely what sort of art is produced. I found that out very clearly earlier this year when illness and my husband's illness almost obliterated any energies for art for a while.

Gerard ter Borch in his famous painting: Woman writing a letter, oil on panel, 1655, (Image courtesy of the Mauritshaus, The Hague)

Johannes Vermeer, A Lady Writing (c. 1665); oil on canvas. Gift of Harry Waldron Havemeyer and Horace Havemeyer, Jr., in memory of their father, Horace Havemeyer. National Gallery of Art

Lady writing a letter with her Maid, c.1670, (oil on canvas) by Jan Vermeer,(Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland )

It can be very encouraging to see that despite the feeling that one has accomplished little in the previous twelve months, there are in fact exhibitions, actions and results to reassure one that, yes, I am a professional artist. Somehow, twelve months rush on in headlong fashion and it is easy to forget what has been accomplished. Try doing a yearly review and share your successes with your friends and collectors. It can be a worthwhile exercice.

"Forgetting about Art"

John Constable, the consummate English Romantic observer of nature and artist of magnificent landscapes, once observed: "when I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture."

I was thinking about this remark of Constable as I settle into my newly furnished studio in Spain and decided I wanted to inaugurate it by painting whatever my eye lit upon as I looked out of the windows. It was an interesting exercise, as in truth, there was a lot of beauty, but nothing that especially spoke to me as potential subject matter. Too many leaves, too much tumbling brilliance of bougainvilleas - in short a jumble of shapes. But I decided I would press on. The result was this small watercolour. I deliberately tried to keep my mind blank and just work by reaciton.

From my New Studio Window, watercolour,  Jeannine Cook artist

Another remark Constable made was equally relevant to this watercolour exercise. Only someone who has worked a lot plein air could have such accurate insights. He said, "No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other."

He was right about the fig tree having a wonderful diversity of leaf forms. He was equally so about the every-changing light, the fugitive shadows, the change in intensity of flower colour... But it was fun to do this study - in a brand new and lovely studio.

When did Art become an Integral Part of Man's Way of Life?

It's been a day of fascinating coincidences.

Before I go further, I should just say that I am very much a child of Africa, I spent many, many blissful hours as a child along the seashores of Kenya and Tanzania and I still have treasured collections of the seashells I gathered there long ago.

Those reasons were enough to prompt me to read with attention an article from August's Scientific American magazine which my husband waved under my nose. Entitled " When the Sea Saved Humanity", it is an account by archaeologist Curtis W. Marean of how his findings in a cave above the rocky coast near Mossel Bay, South Africa, have afforded insights into how the very small and endangered population of Homo sapiens could have survived the dry, cold glacial age that rendered most of Africa uninhabitable from 195,000 to 123,000 years ago. South Africa's coastal bounty of shell fish and its very nutritious underground geophytes or tubers allowed this small group of people (from whom today's nearly seven billion inhabitants descend!) to survive.

Excavations from this cave, PP13B, at Pinnacle Point, have shown that man began living there 164,000 years ago. Evidence from the cave and others in the same area has pushed back to these very early dates proof of human cognition, technological abilities, tracking of time through lunar phases and sophisticated use of marine resources. But they have also shown another highly important sign of human "cognitive modernity", namely the evidence of art and its symbolic usage.

This is where, as an artist, I read with fascinated glee. Amongst the other artefacts found in the cafe at Pinnacle Point were countless pieces of red ocre, carved or ground to powder to mix with some binder, such as animal fat, to make paint for body or other surface adornment. By 110,000 years ago, red ocre and sea shells, collected and saved for their aesthetic appeal, made their appearance in the cave. These point to the existence of the concept of art and other symbolic activities. Another British archaeologist, Ian Watts, has found worked and unworked pieces of red ocre by the thousands at other sites in South Africa, dating from 120,000 years ago. (Remember - the earliest European cave paintings that use red ocre on the cave walls date from 32,000 years ago.)

Curtis Marean also mentions the discovery, in Blombos Cave, to the west of Pinnacle Point, of pieces of ocre with systematic, abstract carving by Christopher S. Henshilwood of the University of Bergen. Along with the ocre rocks, he found refined bone tools and beads, all dating from 75,000 years ago.

The image of the abstractly-decorated rock is courtesy of Christopher Henshilwood and Francesco d'Enrico, via National Geographic.

Red ocre incised brick, 75,000 years old from Blombos Cave, South Africa (Image courtesy  of National Georgraphic, Italy)

This afternoon, I listened to Alix Spiegel, on NPR's All Things considered programme, asking "When did we all become mentally modern?" Symbols again.

Shells like these, into which holes have carefully been drilled by hand, were used as beads. The beads, which were found at Moroccan Middle Paleolithic sites and are believed to be about 82,500 years old, were used as symbols and indicated status and beliefs, much in the way modern wedding rings or religious iconography do. (Image and text courtesy of NPR.org)

Professors Francesco d'Enrico and Marian Vanhaeren published these illustrations of the beads in the Journal of Human Evolution.

All these amazingly early datings of evidence of art and its use in man's daily life give one an even deeper feeling of the centrality of art's role in our lives. We ignore this heritage at our peril.