Gifts of the Moment

Today was one of those gifts that nature bestows on one a few times each summer along the coast, when the humidity drops, the skies are clear and a gentle breeze makes the world joyously sparkling. It was the perfect day to be out drawing along the marshes, a welcome respite from other activities and concerns. The additional incentive was that it was a day designated for drawing by being part of the international Sketchcrawl group.

It was a day to experiment too, with a slightly different format of graphite drawing, with prepared grounds in different subtle colours. I had seen artist George Sorrels' wonderful Arches drawing book in which he had prepared varying sizes of small squares and rectangles in subtle colour, page by pages. Then, according to the subject matter he found, he would select a prepared area and do a graphite drawing of exquisite beauty and sensitivity. So I prepared paper in a number of colours, and sallied forth.

It was enormous fun to be drawing and experimenting, but more than the fun, there were so many gifts of the moment. The salt water marshes, emerald scintillating to golden, were generous with their ever-changing light. The tide flowed full and then softly ebbed, transforming the whole landscape, with the water surface rippled in a million patterns of light from the on-shore breeze. Osprey keened and sailed above. Herons stalked and drowsed, wood storks dangled their long legs just above the spartina grass as they flapped along to the next hunting ground and gulls dipped into the water and swirled back around to dip again. Marsh wrens chattered endlessly from their hidden perches. Schools of fish made their distinctive whoosh of water parting as they leapt in unison to escape a hidden peril. Time lost any meaning.

I don't know if these gifts of beauty, music and peace show up in the art I did in any way, but as artist Phyllis Purvis-Smith remarked in a March 2009 article in American Artist, "experiencing nature for the artist is also important..,". I know that after the time spent drawing, I felt utterly restored by the generosity of the day.

Shimmering Silverpoint

The effect was really amazing. Shimmering silver all around the room, quiet, insistent, powerful. The exhibition, The Luster of Silver, opened this past weekend at the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science in Evansville,
Blue Ridge Mountain Meditation - silverpoint
Jeannine Cook

Indiana, and eight of the artists were present, from all over the country. It was a memorable event, made especially so by the wonderful, thoughtful hospitality of the Director of the Museum, John Streetman.

The first amazing thing was that the size of the drawings in silver was a shock to us, despite having seen the images digitally when Koo Schadler and I were curating the show. Silverpoint is a slow, labour-intensive medium, where you make marks in silver on a prepared surface that has a sufficiently fine tooth on it to pull particles of silver off the stylus to make the drawing. You don't erase because the marks are metal. You don't get punchy darks because silver does not make dark marks. If you want to make a passage darker, you have to wait until it oxidises, and you can then return to put in another layer of silver... but only for so many times. So when I went in first to see the exhibition, I could scarcely believe my eyes. Some of the drawings are huge, such as those by Constance McClure. That represents thousands and thousands of hours of work. Astounding and admirable.

Conversely, some equally amazing drawings were smaller in real life than they were in the reproductions in the exhibition catalogue! George Sorrels has been doing silverpoint for many, many years and does exquisite small leafy landscapes and dreamscapes, with a luster that is astoundingly beautiful. They are minute.

The other really impressive aspect of this silverpoint exhibition is that this quiet, shimmering medium of silverpoint can speak volumes, powerful volumes. The twenty-eight artists represented, all highly diverse, conveyed a passion, an intensity that were memorable. A breathtakingly spare and elegant big study of lilies by Marjorie Williams-Smith seem to suck the air out of one's lungs, somehow, as you look at it. The lilies are so simple, so powerful. A disarmingly direct gaze of a young girl calls one across the room to a tiny, wondrous portrait of Eliza, done in exquisite detail by Koo Schadler, a silverpoint and egg tempera artist of great stature in this country. The disordered orderliness of four abstract pieces framed together with seeming slashes through them called out powerfully from another corner. Gerrit Verstraete, of Canada, is a master of the silvery luster of implied surface abrasions and imperfections that somehow become very serene and poetic.

Silverpoint is a medium with fairly narrow technical parameters - you need a prepared surface on which to draw, you need a metal stylus to make the marks, you cannot erase and you know that all the metals, bar gold and platinum, will oxidise in due course. But the artists involved in The Luster of Silver are remarkable in their ability to push the boundaries of silverpoint to make it a thoroughly 21st century medium, addressing a wide variety of concerns. Their silvery voices, pulsating with light, are well worth seeking out if you are in or near Evansville, Indiana, from now until September 13th this year.

Creighton Bones (after C. Pissarro) - silverpoint

Jeannine Cook