What is Invisible to others

"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others". This was an interesting remark, made by Roberto Polo, artist and founder of Citibank's Fine Art Investment Services, and quoted in the 19th November, 2011, edition of The Spectator by Bevis Hillier.

I found the idea thought-provoking, and was reminded of it in an unusual context. Tomorrow morning, at about 7.30 a.m. in Palma de Mallorca's magnificant Gothic cathedral, La Seu, there is a moment of pure magic.


At that time (and again in November) every year, the giant rose window lines up with the rising sun, and a perfect glowing circle is projected across the vast cathedral to the opposite wall, where another rose window joins in the celebration.

This huge rose window, one of the largest in the world, was created in the 14th century, in the Royal Chapel, using a Levantine design for its more than two thousand pieces of stained glass.










Its fleeting echo, twice a year, on the golden Mallorcan stone wall opposite, is an event that is anticipated eagerly for its amazing beauty.



These two images are courtesy of the website, Mallorcaquality.com, with my thanks.

The design and alignment, let alone actual construction, of this huge rose window is, to me, a perfect example of seeing, in one's mind's eye, what is as yet invisible to others. Its concept implied knowledge of the movement of the sun, the necessary geometrical siting in relation to the rising sun on the requisite days of the year, and an ability to calculate all these parameters and ally them with the actual building dimensions and orientation as it was being built. No computers, no cameras, no lasers... Just vision and skill.

Perhaps that ability to envision something that no one else sees and then to create something that renders the invisible visible is the ultimate hallmark of an artist, whatever the discipline. It is certainly an ability to cultivate.

Artists' Webs of Support

Most artists are fairly solitary people, per force... It is therefore all the more magical - and important - when there is a web of people around who support, encourage and empower artists.

I have been reminded once again of this aspect of life. Living in a very rural part of coastal Georgia, artist friends usually live far away. Networks of fellow artists are much more present, in today's world, through the Internet and other such communications, than previously. That helps a lot. But artists' nearest and dearest family members are probably the most important sources of encouragement, honesty and appreciation. It makes a great difference if an artist can trust and respect the opinions and observations of a spouse, for instance. Whether it is painting, drawing or writing, I know that if I see a look of puzzlement or quizzical amusement on my husband's face, I need to go and do some rethinking about the project. He is the one who always reminds me, "Keep it simple"... very necessary often as I tend to love detail. He is my most respected critic.

Beyond family and fellow artists, there are other circles of support that are invaluable. Gallery personnel, if an artist works through gallery representation, forms the first circle, but for many of us who prefer to represent ourselves, the collectors of one's art become an important part of life. Many, many of the people who have been nice enough to like my art have become dear personal friends - a wonderful bonus. Their encouragement, especially when they return to acquire more art, carries one though periods of self-doubt. They help one to "hang on to one's star" and to continue listening to one's inner voice that tells one to go on trying to grow as an artist.

Another shining circle of supporters, that makes me feel validated and very lucky, is comprised of museum curators and directors, professionals in academia, the arts and others whose own achievements I hugely respect. When I turn to them for help or advice, I am very aware of the value of the support given by these busy people.

When I feel I am floundering as an artist, I remind myself of all these support webs around me. And then the word that comes into my mind is, "Adelante!" ... a simple Spanish word for "get on with it!". And off I start again as an artist...

Art sustaining daily life - it works!

Many a week has flashed past since I last blogged here, weeks that began with a wonderful kalidescope of art exhibitions in London for five days (of which more in future days) but then became a succession of shocks and anxieties as my beloved Rundle was found to have a ruptured aneurysm in his leg. Art obviously took very much a back seat as I robed and unrobed on my visits to the ICU in a local hospital, where Rundle lay fighting to beat the high odds of losing his leg.

For the next weeks, Rundle was in a hospital room overlooking the azure Mediterranean, with the view framed by beautiful umbrella pines and buildings that perfectly complemented the scene with luminous ocres and cream facades. Expansive and beautiful - I finally was able to do some quick drawings, but the wonderful variety of moods and lights was harder to capture. Nonetheless, even the act of picking up a pencil to draw helped to ground me again in this strange world in which both of us were living. Showing Rundle the drawings seemed to help him too, despite the grinding pain and discomfort.

Now the days back at home are far more interlinked with art. It helps at every turn - distraction for Rundle as he recuperates, centering for me when I can slip away for a few minutes to start drawing tiny silverpoints - a series on black ground (again!) which I found myself referring to as Ariadne's Thread. She provided the thread that helped Thesus wend his way out of the Labyrinth after he had killed the Minotaur. It seems art is helping us out of our labyrinth, towards sustaining a more normal life.

Meanwhile, my earlier gambles with an artist's eye in decisions on reorganising a house are paying off. By now, furniture is moved, paintings hung in different places, lighting improved, and everything is indeed becoming serene. Beautiful things can now breath and be seen, with remarkably few major changes. It confirms the fun and huge importance of being an artist, even in daily life when one is not wielding a paint brush! Art does sustain.

Trusting your Eyes

Mary Beth McKenzie, the highly acclaimed figurative artist observed, "Artists make things so much easier for themselves when they learn to trust their eyes".

I was alluding to this aspect of art-making yesterday in a blog about "the selective eye". The artist's eye is a most important tool, not only for observing and informing the artist, but also in the other sense, the inner eye, which develops with experience, training, discernment... time and work.

Trusting one's eyes is almost the first important step towards becoming an artist. I was lucky enough to learn to draw by the Nicolaides method, always drawing from real life, using contours and gesture drawing to learn of the subject.
"There is only one right way to draw... physical contact with all sorts of objects through all the senses," Kimon Nicolaides declared, and it is true, I have found, for me. His method involved not looking at the paper, but fixing one's eyes intently on the subject being drawn, to hone the eye-hand connection.

Once that eye-hand connection is made, you begin to be able to trust your eyes and know that somehow, almost miraculously, it sometimes seems, the drawing will work out alright. Later, I learned to trust my eyes in terms of colour selection and assessment, so that the paintings seem, mostly, to work from the colour point of view. But this trust is an ever-developing, ever-active business. The more you draw and paint, the more you observe and use your eyes in every possible way, the better your eyes serve you to create art. Precious tools for an artist - it behoves us all to take care of our eyes, literally and figuratively!

Definitions

Here I am, defining myself for many a long year as an artist, and yet, yesterday, I was brought up short. I was reading a short article by Ruth Walker entitled Art, Artisans and artisanal grilled cheese in the January 24, 2010, edition of The Christian Science Monitor. In this article, Ms. Walker addresses the origins and meaning of the word "art". I realised that I felt totally ignorant about the whole subject. Abjectly ignorant!

I rushed off to my beloved Oxford English Dictionary to learn more. I knew that "art" came from the Latin "ars", a word that passed into French and then into early English, as did so many words. But the timing and nuances of meaning for "art" were fascinating. The first use of the word comes in 1225, when the word meant skill in doing anything as the result of knowledge and practice. According to Ms. Walker, the original Latin concept embraced a skill of things being "joined" or "fitted together". By 1386, Chaucer was talking of art as a human skill or human workmanship, as opposed to nature, while earlier that century, art was already included in general learning taught in schools, as well as the skills required in applying the principles of a special science.

Only in 1600 did the word "art" start to refer to the application of skills to subjects of taste such as poetry, music, dancing, etc. J. Taylor is cited in the OED as saying that, "Spencer and Shakespeare in art did excell". However, the use of "art" to refer to "the application of skills to the arts of imitation and design, Painting, Engraving, Sculpture, Architecture; the cultivation of these in its principles, practice and results: the skillful production of the beautiful in visible forms" only came into use after 1880.

From then on, art has mainly referred to the many aspects of the realm now referred to aesthetics, but it also now includes more negative aspects of studied actions, artful devices, trickery and cunning... hardly surprising!

What interested me, on digging further about the meaning of the word "art" as defined today, is how often that word "beautiful" creeps into the definition. In ReferenceDictionary.com, the first definition is, "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful (my emphasis), appealing, or of more than ordinary significance." In the Free Online Dictionary, they started the definition by, "the conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty (again, my emphasis), specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.". In the Brainy Quote, they talk of, "the application of skill to the production of the beautiful by imitation or design, or an occupation in which skill is so employed, as in painting or sculpture..."

The other word which appears often in the definition of "Art" is nature. In Your Dictionary, the first meaning is, "human ability to make things; creativity of man as distinguished from the world of nature (my emphasis)". In Answers, art is "a human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature."

Whilst the 20th century saw many reactions against the concepts of beauty and nature in the visual arts, in particular, I think it is instructive that art has for so, so long been defined as having skills and knowledge that derive from and celebrate the world around us. After all, it was Plato who said that "art is imitation".

A Fascinating Book on Art

Between starting to paint and draw in my new studio and rushing off to swim in the chrystalline Mediterranean, I have been savouring of a most interesting book on all aspects of art. The Art Detective: Fakes, Frauds and Finds and the Search for Lost Treasures by Philip Mould is the perfect book for summer reading. Published last year in the UK by Viking, it appeared this year in the United States.

Not only is the account a fascinating story of finding lost or mis-identified art, especially by early British artists, but the author is generous with his insights and knowledge about art, good art, and how artists achieve their successful effects. His familiarity with the characteristics and idiosyncracies of artists' methods of painting, especially those of the 17th and 18th centuries, is very instructive. In fact, it is a book well worth re-reading, after the summer!

Many of us will be familiar with Philip Mould from his role on the BBC's Antique Roadshow so this book is a delightful addition to the erudition for which he is already recognised. What impressed me are the layers and layers of analysis, historical and artistic knowledge, technical expertise backed up with technology, and - ultimately - gut feelings that are brought to bear on a work of art. No wonder he is called an Art Detective. And he makes it all fascinating and fun.

It's a book well worth reading.

The Selective Eye

As I watched an episode of Art Wolfe's Travels to the Edge on public television, I was constantly reminded of the parallels between his criteria as a photographer and those of an artist, especially an artist working plein air. When you arrive somewhere and you are hoping to create images of beauty, impact and meaning, you almost have to listen to your inner voice to help decide when and where to position yourself to record such possible images. Frequently there is not much time to waste - the scene changes, the mist lifts, the light alters, people or animals move away - and the image has evaporated.

With time and experience, you can learn to analyse time and light situations to help you find the perfect contre-jour lighting for a scene or the ideal position from which to see dawn break over a landscape you want to record, for instance. It is basically a question of being really observant. Of course, photography is considerably faster than painting or drawing. Nonetheless, it is sometimes surprising how much information one can quickly record as an artist if one is excited enough about a scene to want to capture it properly. Many artists use a camera as an aide-memoire too, but personally I find that the two-dimensionality of the recorded image, with its frequent paucity of detail, is not very helpful then to record another two-dimensional painted or drawn image. (There are also those indefinable extra dimensions you experience - of sounds, scents, feel - that somehow all filter into artwork created in situ, and are often absent from art created from photographs.) Nonetheless, however you create art, you still need to be able to choose your vantage point from which to record an image. Often, it needs to be a quick, almost visceral decision.

Composition, light, colour - they can all underpin what you want to say - as a photographer or as a painter or draughtsman. Nonetheless, experience also teaches one that you can start out trying to record a scene, urban, rural or whatever, and within short order, the artwork itself has taken over, and the image starts to dictate its own progress. You are recording the passing of time, in essence, especially if you are working from life. There is another ingredient in image-making: that of the artist's frame of mind that prevails when one is photographing, drawing or painting. How one feels, something one is thinking of, a phrase in one's head at the time, music, rustling leaves or birdsong heard at the time, the weather one is experiencing - they all influence the art being created. Consciously or unconsciously, each of us is a form of barometer, and our art shows our "weather", in the choice of scene, the way it is depicted and its implicit messages.

Each of us also has an innate predilection for certain types of scenes to which we respond and will want to use to create art. Our individualism is important and we all need to believe in our own eye and approach. Nonetheless, it does not hurt to have a knowledge of great master works, paintings, drawings, photographs... They inform our choices too. After all, as Picasso remarked, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." So as an artist or photographer scouts for possible images to record, that background knowledge is part of the sixth sense that each of us needs to start the act of creating art.

Seeing the Marvellous

Flying high above Georgia's hinterland in the dusk, I was watching all details of the land below disappear into soft evening haze. Suddenly, a marvellous swirled flash of silver and golden glints leapt from the darkness below. I gazed enthralled, for it was truly beautiful in its sinuous elegance. Then it was gone - the light and our position in the sky had changed. I later deduced that it must have been the Oconee River in its middle reaches.

The magical image stayed in my mind's eye, and I have finally tried to translate it into a silverpoint drawing... as yet unscanned. But I keep feeliing that glimpse of the silvered world far below me was a wonderful,, fleeting gift.

The episode made me think of a quote made by the extraordinary French poet, Charles Baudelaire. He said, "We are envelopped and drenched in the marvellous, but we do not see." He is so often correct - we live in a world of haste and stress, rushing from one thing to the next, a life style that often precludes our stopping to savour of something simple, beautiful, uplifting. Yet those moments, when we can perceive the marvellous around us, enrich and anchor our lives.

Carol Prusa's silverpoints

A fellow silverpoint artist, Carol Prusa, Professor at Florida Atlantic University, currently has an exhibition, Silver Linings: Delicate Drawings, at the Polk Museum in Lakeland, Florida. She has been in two exhibitions with me at museums and I have been more and more fascinated and impressed with her work.

Silverpoint is a drawing medium which basically had its beginnings in the 12th century with the monks in monasteries working on illuminated manuscripts, but Carol has achieved the most perfect update of this medium for the 21st century. Using the same marks made with a silver stylus, she has evolved from the flat surface of vellum, parchment, paper or board to spherical acrylic surfaces on which she draws. She also shows herself to be fully of our technological times, sometimes combining the domed drawings with fiber optics or video. The drawings she conceives are the most hypnotically compelling amalgam of delicate patterning and abstract intellectual concepts, alluding to biology, philosophy, theology or physics. Yet as you are drawn into their delicacy and beauty, the underpinnings of this deep and informed thinking that led to their creation become the background music. Knowing how slow the medium of silverpoint can be to develop, I cannot but marvel at the amount of detail, and thus time, that characterise Carol's work. Layer upon layer, pattern after pattern, the drawings are built up to an incredibly satisfying and sensuous harmony. As Daniel Stetson, Executive Director of the Polk Museum wrote in the elegant catalogue for the exhibition, "... it is through countless tiny details working in unison that beauty of both form and function are created. "

Silverpoint is a medium that lends itself to the clear rendering of such "tiny details". Historically, silverpoint has been the medium of choice for scientific drawings, such as botanical studies, with even such artists as Judith Leyster, using it. ( Incidentally, it is the 400th anniversary of Leyster's birthday, celebrated with a wonderful exhibition currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.) Leyster did a study of a tulip in silverpoint and watercolour in 1643; she was one of the last to use silverpoint for many a long year after that, because everyone forgot about the medium until the early 19th century. When silverpoint was "rediscovered" - because Cennini Cennini's manuscript of his 1390 how-to art book, Il Libro dell'arte, was found in the Laurentian Library in Italy and artists began to learn about this drawing medium - most of the artists promptly used it for drawings requiring fine lines and delicate details. Carol is the most perfect heir to this heritage. Her drawings provide insights into the world in an elegantly rigorous fashion that bridges science, art and pure visual pleasure.

Rush off and see this exhibition if you are in the Lakeland area of Florida. You will be rewarded.

Repetition in Art

When I was thinking about how I tend to return again and again to the same flowers to draw or paint them, I was interested to find a review by Andrew Lambirth in The Spectator of 2nd January 2010 of William Feaver's monograph of the artist, Frank Auerbach. The review was entitled "Master of Accretion", and in the review, Lambirth wrote: "Painting the same subjects does not produce staleness and repetition, nor the contempt traditionally ascribed to familiarity. In fact, Auerbach states that 'to paint the same head over and over leads to unfamiliarity; eventually you get near the raw truth about it.'"

Feaver, a noted author of books on artists ranging from Lucien Freud to Van Gogh, comments: "Constancy makes for opportunity and feeds the impetus for surprise. Then it's a matter of focus and nerve".

It is true, I think, for all subjects in art. The more you delve into a subject, drawing and painting it time and time again, in different lights, in different circumstances and places, the more you realise that you still have a great deal to learn about it. Perhaps that is the addictive magic of art - it is a constant voyage of discovery. Even if you understand how things "fit together" in, say, a flower, each time nature produces some slight difference, some surprise. It all keeps one on one's toes, and reminds one of the need of careful observation, without taking anything for granted. Even if one does not work as Frank Auerbach does, with paintings that are built up and up over a long period of time, perhaps with scrapings down again, but all representing a huge psychic and physical effort, you can still work layer upon layer of experience in art. Even drawings done again and again of the same subject afford deeper insights and surprises.

I illustrated my previous post about every artist having favourite flowers with a silverpoint drawing I did of a head of Regale Lilies. These fragrant lilies were growing in one pot. In another pot was growing another Regale Lily, whose bulb had been purchased at the same time and grown in exactly the same way.

Yet one lily produced tight bunches on the head of flowers; the other produced single, far more open flowers, with leaves down the stem that were completely different from the other plants.

Only when I drew them and studied them closely did the differences become really apparent. A casual glance, even an admiring glance, would not have revealed such variations in habit of growth. It taught me to look far more closely at each lily as it grows and flowers.

No wonder Frank Auerbach became such a assiduous student of the same subjects for his art. I am sure he must find it incredibly rewarding. I certainly do, in my drawings that I return to again and again - the delights of nature are unending!

The Financial Rewards of Art and Culture

It is not an easy time to be a member of the arts community, no matter what role each of us plays in it. On a personal level, one's colleagues all talk of funding difficulties, slow art sales, diminished public support. In the press, there are frequent reports of slashed funding for the arts and culture; today, I was reading that the Prado Museum in Madrid, flagship of Spain's museums, has had its Government support cut by six million euros and counting. Hard times... but at least the Prado is fighting back. They are now going to open seven days a week, something to celebrate.

Yet at the same time, I stumbled on a report on today's HuffPost Detroit of a report released about the impact of the arts and culture on Michigan's economy which makes one think. Some 221 arts organisations in Michigan shared their economic data to help formulate the Michigan Cultural Data Project, which analyses, on an on-going and ever-wider basis, what effect the arts have on this American state's economy. The figures are eloquent - for every dollar spent by the Michigan State on arts and culture, five-one ($51) dollars are returned to the state economy. That is quite a return.

That is the sort of message that all governments need to hear. Europeans seem more receptive to such information because they have always been keenly aware of tourist returns on investment in their cultural riches. Americans, on the whole, seem a little less aware of the huge impact that a vibrant arts scene can have - hence the importance of such information as that generated in Michigan. Even in today's less than cheery financial news coming out of Davos, Switzerland, there are ways to enhance the quality of our lives in terms of arts and culture.

A New Art Studio

It's completed! I am sitting in my new art studio in Spain, marvelling in space, light and all sorts of new possibilities. I now know a little better the excitement of which I have read countless times - when an artist gets his or her new studio.

From being a dark and damp garage built in the late 50s, this studio has metamorphosed into a high-ceilinged space filled with the brilliance of Mediterranean light. White walls, large windows and a large mirror all make that difference. A speckled cream tiled floor completes the airy look. I have spent the last week or so finding simple, functional furniture to install, complemented with comfortable chairs and wide table surfaces.

Beyond, through the windows, I am watching doves sip water at a bowl shaded by gracious elms, while blackbirds are carefully inspecting the wonderfully sculptural fig tree to see how ripe the figs are after the intense heat we had last week. Not ripe enough! No matter, they and the other fig-lovers (semi-wild rowdy parakeets and humans alike) will be watching carefully, day by day. The intense luminous cerise of bougainvilleas punctuate the dappled greens of trees, while the cascade of blue plumbago flowers tumble out of cypress trees to meet the lemony white or shocking pink of oleanders. Today is cool and almost springlike, to the relief of all, save - perhaps - the northern tourists at the beach. Black caps and Sardinian warblers join sparrows in song as they flit amongst the white bougainvillea and jasmine.

The studio is such a delight that it is almost inhibiting. Will I be able to produce art worthy of this space...? Time alone will give me that answer. But at least I can now savour more fully what each artist feels when he or she moves into a new dream studio.

Playing in art - revisited

I talked in an earlier blog about the insights into the value of play in our daily lives and the role that play has in allowing artists to develop and create. I was reflecting again on the way artists can play in creating art, and realised that there is another aspect to this activity of play.

When I am drawing or painting, a private game that I play with myself is seeing how I can convey the essence of my perceived reality - be it landscape, flower, person... - with the minimum of lines (in drawing) or colour (in painting). I try to distill the subject to the absolute minimum of detail which still allows the viewer to recognise (more or less!) what is being portrayed. Each work is an endlessly interesting challenge in this respect. Organising abstraction as visual elements that convey reality is really a game to see how best one can succeed in minimalist depiction of the subject matter. Artists have done this since time immemorial - think of the essence of bison galloping across the walls of Altamira or the aurochs of Lascaux. Dolphins cavorting across the frescoed walls of Minoan palaces and octupii reaching around their painted ceramic jars come to mind too. In all these cases, the imagery is distilled and organised almost to the point of abstraction, yet utter realism results - powerful, arresting and memorable.

Old Masters, from Renaissance times onwards, also skilfully selected and simplified design elements to make their compositions more successful and beautiful. They used the abstraction of closely related values joined together in massed forms, which allowed the viewer's eye to be led to the focal points which are depicted realistically. Abstraction was certainly not the "invention" of the 20th century. If you carefully study any good drawing or painting, of no matter what era, that is purportedly realistic, you can see all sorts of amazing elisions, squiggles, blobs and lines that seem to have nothing to do specifically with the subject being depicted. Yet, when looked at as a whole, the art is convincing. I am sure, too, that the artist was probably having fun and enjoying playing as the work progressed.

Artists' Egos

An aspect of the art world that the general public often talks about is an artist's ego - it is part of the domain of artistic myths and legends. Everyone, at one point or another, has heard about an artist seemingly behaving like a prima donna. It makes good copy for a reporter or writer and interests many readers.

Nonetheless, artists themselves seldom think specifically about ego or how they might be perceived as having a large ego. Usually we are all too involved with our artwork and artistic endeavours, and anxious to ensure its visibility, success and survival. There is usually such a clamour in the public space that it is hard to get viewed, heard, understood...

Marina Abramovic, a very successful artist whose reputation is coupled with a sense of serious dedication to her work, talked in an interesting way about artists' egos. She was interviewed in May 2009 by David Ebony in Art in America, and described how she had gained humility during a month-long yoga retreat in which she had participated. To achieve complete emptiness in her thinking, she talked of retraining herself to work from the top downwards, thus achieving an absence of ego. She remarked, "Our culture is so much about building up the ego of the artist. But it's not you who is important, it's the work. The ego is actually an obstacle to the work." (The image above is courtesy of the Guardian, UK, from an article by James Westcott about Abramovic's 2010 exhibition at MOMA, The Artist is Present.)

Thinking about her statement made me measure its truth. If you have envisaged a work of art and launch into making it, there is frequently an insistent little voice in your head talking about those preconceived ideas, how the work might be perceived, what effect the work might have on a viewer, etc.... Emptying your mind of all expectations and simply flowing, almost instinctively, with the development of the work is a totally different affair. Things happen that you do not know consciously about, perceptions that only become obvious after coming out of the creative phase, conversations that develop in spite of or despite the ego. Making art becomes a voyage into the unknown, a voyage unaccompanied by preconceptions and that looming sense of self.

After all, at the end of any creation process, the work has to stand on its own feet, away from any reference to the artist, in many senses. This situation was driven home to me a couple of days ago when I walked into the beautiful home of a new friend. On her walls hung a number of interesting pieces of art, some of which I recognised instantly, but many of which were created by artists I did not know. Their work was just that - artwork - and each piece transmitted its messages to me. The ensuing dialogue was, of course, coloured by my life experience and perceptions, but nevertheless, the paint on canvas or drawing marks on paper had to "make their own sale" to me. The artist's ego, in each case, was a moot point. No longer were there a gallery owner or the artist at my elbow to explain and validate the work.

It seems to me that Ms. Abramovic spoke wisely about ensuring that the ego should not get in the way of creating art. Letting art guide one in its making and then in its dialogue with the world is, in truth, very complicated and yet, very simple.

Every Artist has Favourite Flowers....

While on the subject of flowers in art, I realised that each artist has favourite flowers to which he or she returns again and again, whether because of colour, form, symbolism, or whatever.


You only have to think of Georgia O'Keeffe - her depictions of calla lilies are numerous. She loved their sensuous shape, their wonderful designs. In fact, she said quite a lot about painting flowers which especially applies to her Calla Lilies: " When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not." She also remarked, "I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty. " She was quite right. When you walk into a room and see one or more of her Callas paintings, they stop one in one's tracks.



When you look at a calla lily painting or drawing, the symbolism is also implicit: since early Roman times, callas have represented celebrations and purity, hence their use for weddings.


Although they originate in Southern Africa ( perhaps why I love them so much, being from that part of the world...), they bloom well in the dark of winter and symbolised the passage of the winter solstice for the Romans. That is perhaps why they are also used so much for funerals, at the darkest time of the year. They came to Europe many centuries ago, but the first known illustration of them was apparently in 1664, when a calla lily was growing in the Royal Gardens in Paris. Since then, countless artists, from Diego Rivera to Marsden Hartley and Ellsworth Kelly, have depicted callas.

I keep returning to calla lilies myself - they seem to lend themselves to silverpoint drawings, with their high key elegance and sensuous forms. They are living sculptures.

Another flower to which I alluded in my previous post about flowers in art is the Regale Lily, favoured in paintings about the Annunciation. It too is a wonderfully elegant, perfumed lily, which keeps calling me to draw it, every time that I find it blooming in my mother's garden in Spain. Each time one is differently inspired - perhaps the light is different, perhaps the flower is slightly different or at a different stage of opening, but whatever it is, I love to return to these lilies, both callas and regales, just to celebrate their beauty. And while I am drawing them, time stands still, and the world comes into balance. Miraculous.

Flowers in Art

After a week of much colder weather, the flower garden is definitely in winter mode, save for a few brave camellias now venturing to bloom again. They are one of the most beautiful aspects of Southern gardens for me, and I can never plant enough of them, particularly the whites and pale shell pinks.

Since there is so little variety outside, I have been going through flower paintings in my mind's eye. This was made all the easier as I have been thinking about medieval times, when religious texts were becoming more and more luxurious, with an increasing demand for Books of Hours by wealthy patrons. Many of these jewel-like small creations are bedecked with the most wonderful depictions of flowers, many of them with floral symbols to underline the religious truths of the texts. An introduction to some of these images, with colours glowing and flowers ranging from pinks to violets, asters, forget-me-nots, daisies or roses, shows that by 1410, artists were producing the most amazing Books of Hours for patrons such as Catherine of Cleves, Flemish or French nobility. Perhaps the most famous is Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, painted from 1412-1416 almost exclusively by the three Limbourg brothers, Paul, Henri and Jean. Interestingly, there are not many details of flowers, but even here, in one image of a Funeral Service, campanula wander amongst the text on one column. By 1500, the use of flowers in Books of Hours was widespread, as can be seen in this edition done in Rouen, France, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. (The illustration above is one I called Palma's Book of Hours, done in silverpoint and watercolour, as the tobacco/nicotiana opened and closed each day in a rhythm which marked off the hours for me in perfumed regularity.)

Another early devotional book, the Wilton Diptych, was created in England c. 1395-1399, for the purposes of accompanying its rich travelling owner. In one scene, pink roses adorn the angels' heads, but apparently they were originally the red Rosa Gallica, one of the earliest known rose varieties. An image of this can be found, amongst others, on a wonderful web page on the BBC. This site depicts a wide variety of flower paintings down the ages and it underlines the continuous attraction for artists of flowers, in their beautiful diversity and elegance. This is hardly surprising when one thinks that we humans have always known flowers - they have been in existence for about 120 million years. Fascinatingly, they have apparently always played a central role for humans - archaeologists have found a burial site for a man, two women, and a child, in a cave in Iraq. They were Neanderthals, living in these Pleistocene caves. On this burial site had been placed a bunch of flowers.

The Greeks placed great store on flowers, such as violets and had them in their houses and wore them in crowns at feast times. The Romans did the same and held festivals of flowers to honour the goddess, Flora. Remember the fresco uncovered in Pompeii of Flora and her flowers. Roses were the flower of the goddess of love, Venus; roses too have always been celebrated by Confucians and Buddhists.

The early Renaissance artists loved to depict lilies in Annunciation scenes - Fra Filippo Lippi was one of the early ones in 1450, for instance. Leonardi da Vinci did the most exquisite drawings of Regale lilies. You can almost feel the weight of the flowers as he studied them and drew them in pen and ink. The Pre-Raphaelites also loved lilies - on the BBC site I mentioned earlier, there is a reproduction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Annunciation" with the lilies the most graceful complement. Then there is the wondrously atmospheric John Singer Sargent painting, "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose", done in 1885-6, with the children and beautiful tall, proud lilies in the luminous twilight.

The seventeenth century was also the heyday of Dutch flower painting, done by both men and women. One of the most successful was Rachel Ruysch, while another was Judith Leyster, who did some silverpoint drawings of tulips. Flemish-born Ambrosius Bosschaert was one of the first to specialise in flower paintings and others like Jan van Huysum and Jan Bruegel followed his footsteps with looser, often more brilliant styles. Since a lot of the Dutch flower paintings were also about Holland's wide-flung world power and dominance, as well as the flowers' beauty, the artists did not hesitate to mix up flowers from all parts of the world, which would never bloom at the same time. They composed the most astonishing mixes in their arrangements, requiring a lot of time and ingenuity to pull the complex compositions together.

France forged a different approach to flower painting. Pierre Joseph Redouté began his highly talented life as a flower painter under Queen Marie Antoinette's patronage, but the Empress Josephine hastened to continue the patronage after the Revolution. His wonderfully sensitive "portraits" of flowers and plants are so realistic one can almost smell the perfume, for instance, of his roses, and he managed also to combine careful science with astonishing art. He helped pioneer a whole sub-group of botanical artists whose numbers, today, have swelled amazingly and fruitfully throughout the world. Take a look at the American Society of Botanical Artists' website, for instance - I am proud to be a member of the burgeoning Society. (Dr. Shirley Sherwood, of London, has been one of the major supporters of this renaissance of botanical art, and now her collection is not only showing in many venues around the world, but also at Kew in a permanent, dedicated gallery.)

The second half of the 19th century produced some wonderful flower painters in France - Manet did some exquisite studies of flowers in vases, while Henri Fatin-Latour became famous for the way in which he painted roses and peonies, larkspur and other wonderful summer flowers. He would wait until the roses almost dropped their petals, so as to be able to capture that ultimate fullness of musky beauty in each petal. Monet delighted in his flower garden, culminating with the glories of Giverny and his lily pond, while Renoir and Degas were no slouches in their depictions of chrysanthemums, geraniums and other plants. Of course, everyone knows about Vincent van Gogh and his passionate sunflower paintings... he had moved far from the exquisite jewels of medieval flower painting, but left all of us the richer for both approaches. Odile Redon comes to mind too for his pastel studies of flowers that were far beyond just the botanical and yet are brilliantly evocative in their somewhat strange feel.

The twentieth century seems to have always had its lovers of flower paintings. An interesting note I saw was that 55% of all art considered "decorative" and available today is floral art. No wonder there was a reaction against flower paintings in juried shows for a long time! Nonetheless, a lot of us artists have continued to celebrate flowers in art - they are just too important to ignore, and besides, when a garden is in the depths of winter, at least one can evoke warmer times by having paintings or drawings of flowers on the walls.

(I evoked spring with my silverpoint drawing of Azaleas, while the heat of summer can be remembered in the Summer Brilliance of Cannas, which I painted in watercolour.)

Beginning with a drawing

Today I was out painting on the marshes, and the reflections and patterns were unbelievable as the tide flowed serenely in. Working in watercolours, plein air, not from photographs, one can become schizophrenic as things change so quickly. Added to that changeability of light and pattern, you have a lot of humidity, so watercolours seem to take for ever to dry. So I was doing what I seldom do, doing two paintings concurrently.

Pretty soon, I remembered, a little wryly, a remark I found that Hans Holbein the Younger had made: "everything began with a drawing..." How true! If I had not made a relatively loose but nonetheless careful drawing before I started each painting, I would have been in deep trouble. In one painting, I got fascinated with the reflections of three docks along a creek edge, and the play of light on their pilings, roofs, etc. However, between the drawing and later (sort of!) completion of the watercolour, people had moved boats around, the tide had come in, the sun had gone over and clouds had come up. Without at least a rough "road map" underneath, I would not have known how to continue the painting at some points.

I think I first learned to the value of an initial under-drawing for a watercolour many, many years ago in Alaska. I was doing a landscape of the dramatic mountains and inlets near Homer, and to my delight, there was a little red plane parked at just the right focal point. I had drawn it very roughly, intending to return in more detail as I got more to painting that part... Painting away happily, I suddenly realised that I was hearing the sound of a plane engine starting up. Before I could remedy my omissions of detail, the little red plane had sailed up into the air and disappeared! So much for my focal point!

In other words, draw, draw and draw again - one never regrets it.

The Honesty of Drawing

I found a quote by Sandy Davidson about drawing that I find interesting. She said, "Drawing is intimate and reveals exactly where we are, and in a culture that isn't comfortable with that, it frightens many. You just cannot cheat when you draw."

Considering that drawing, in its many forms, has enjoyed an amazing resurgence in popularity and interest these past few years, that statement begins to make one wonder: Are we as a society becoming more accepting of others' differences, of other tastes and cultures? Has tolerance begun to seep in at the edges of this complex world we live in, particularly in the United States?

If drawing, indeed a truthful and sometimes brutally direct medium, is being more widely understood, then it is holding up mirrors of ourselves to us and our fellow citizens that we can find more to our liking. Perhaps a note of hope at a time when society seems as riven as ever by divergencies of politics, ethics, beliefs...

Going miniature

This morning, when hunting for a copy of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat on our bookshelves, I happened on a forgotten but delightful little book of portrait miniatures published in England some while ago. I promptly sat down to savour of the wondrous skill of the heirs of Jean Clouet who had pioneered such tiny portraits when he was Court Painter to Francois I of France in the early 1500s. His son, Francois Clouet, and Hans Holbein the Younger followed and developed this genre of limning, as miniature-painting was called. During Elizabeth I's reign, the English Court enthusiastically favoured miniature portraits for political purposes as well as love and desire as they were expressed in that era of courtly love. Luxurious, bejewelled frames surrounded gems painted by Nicholas Hilliard, Hans Ewoth, Hilliard's pupil, Isaac Oliver, and others. The next generation was equally gifted in limning, with Isaac's son, Peter Oliver, and Samuel Cooper producing extraordinary works. Cooper's miniature of Oliver Cromwell has an amazingly contemporary feel to it and an almost photographic quality in the likeness, including the warts which apparently Cromwell expressly instructed him to record!

First painted on paper in watercolour and gouache, the miniaturists gradually evolved towards painting on ivory, with later artists such as Rosalba Carriera achieving great luminosity on this surface. Miniatures continued to be greatly esteemed, especially in England, but their second great flowering came when court painting was revived under the influence of Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough. Miniaturists George Engleheart and Richard Cosway were among the leading artists during the period 1750-1850. In France, too, even after the Revolution, miniatures enjoyed great success, with Jean-Urbain Guerin and Jean-Baptiste Isabey using their great skills to combine simplicity of line and form with exactitude of subject matter. Photography's invention sounded the death knell for miniatures. As I gazed at the exquisite small images in the book I had found, I could not help reflecting on the difference between these works of art which served as portrait-records of all manner of people down the ages and the small thumbnail photos we all post on websites like Facebook today as representative of ourselves for others to see.

One of the most wonderful collections of miniatures is held by the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, in London's Manchester Square. The collection dated mainly from the 17th and 18th century, and the variety and jewel-like quality of these miniatures have always remained fixed vividly in my memory. Well worth a visit. Of course, the other two London museums boasting important collections of miniatures are the V & A and the National Portrait Gallery. Another small and lovely collection I happened on is at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC - again with the British heritage influencing the commission of many of these miniatures by the early South Carolinians.

I always love the many coincidences in life that come along. In the case of finding this book on miniatures, it drove home to me the interesting technical considerations a miniaturist has. Size and thus proportions, the amount of information to include and the technical considerations of surface, paint medium and even the format of a circle, the normal shape for a miniature (although rectangles were used)... these are very specific parameters. The coincidence in this case was that I have been recently using the format of artists' trading cards, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2", to paint and draw as an experiment. This small size presents a whole new set of considerations and requirements, particularly in terms of composition - fun to try out! But it has already left me with a heightened sense of respect for those great limners of earlier times. They were great masters.