The Lines progressed....

Well, the line-making slowly progressed on my Dendrobium Delight drawing in graphite and I eventually declared an end. By this time, the flower buds had opened and everything had moved around in the usual dynamic way nature has of reminding one who "rules".

Yet the act of drawing made me reflect on how any drawing is really a voyage into ourselves, to bring out we know not quite what, ahead of time. As that wonderfully thoughtful artist, Luisa Rabbia, remarked about artists in general: "In the end, we all talk about life, death, time and our presence on Earth." This became even more pertinent a remark for me, for while I was drawing, I was listening to Senator Ted Kennedy's memorial service on television and reflecting on his life and the many acts of quiet kindness and compassion. As Placido Domingo sang Panis Angelicus, with Yo-Yo Ma accompanying him so sonorously on the 'cello, the beauty of the music seemed to flow into my pencils as I drew. Susan Graham's wonderfully serene Ave Maria was balm to the soul - it must have seemed so to the countless people listening around the world as well as in the spacious Basilica.

This drawing of the vibrant Dendrobium will, I know from other experiences I have had when painting or drawing, now always evoke for me this time of music, celebration and mourning for Ted Kennedy. Resquiescat in pace.

A Progression of Lines

These hot, humid days make staying at home in air-conditioned coherence very attractive. This means that all of a sudden, I find that my "eye" spots potential drawings or paintings in places I normally don't expect. It is the bonus of quiet days at home mid-summer, I have learned.

Today's bonus was a beautiful dendrobium that obligingly reblooms on a regular basis - it has produced elegant, shapely flowers, but at the gravity-defying angles that hallmark my dendrobiums. Staking them, greenhouse fashion, doesn't seem to work for me! As I sat listening to music and starting to do a graphite drawing of the flowers and strange stem, I kept thinking back to remarks I had read by Luisa Rabbia when she was being interviewed in Art in America after her Residency at the Isabella Gardiner Museum in Boston. Talking about drawing, she said "Drawing is for me a way of writing, recording moments, the passing of time ... you change ideas so many times when you are working, and I like that. I start from something and never know where I am going to." It is true. I find the same thing. I might start drawing, say, the dendrobium, but by the time I have worked for a while, the flowers I am depicting not only have changed themselves, but I had also added, subtracted, moved and generally altered things substantially. I draw for a while, then stop and make a cup of tea... the perfect way then to return to the drawing with a fresher eye, to assess a little where I am going, what needs next to be done. The original idea that sparked the drawing is still there in its core, but the drawing itself has taken hold of my initial passion and made it its own.

Luisa Rabbia was accurate and eloquent about drawing - "A drawing itself is a record of the development of an idea. You change ideas so many times.... For me, the shape of each line is determined by the shape of the preceding line and determines the shape of the following line. There is this progression of lines, thoughts and moments." It does not really matter what you are drawing - a landscape, an abstract, a still life or a flower... the process of drawing seems to follow the same progression and development. The drawing medium does not alter this process either. As Luisa also remarked, line "is like breathing". One line falls naturally into place after the previous one, almost involuntarily, until suddenly, a little voice inside one's head says "stop" and you know that you have reached the end of that particular drawing journey.

Fascinating and addictive, this drawing process...

Silverpoint and graphite drawings from Sapelo

It is interesting how a beautiful place like Sapelo Island inspires one to do so many different types of art. Now that I have been able to look again at the work I produced last weekend on the Island as Artist-in-Residence, I realise that I managed to produce some very different pieces, ranging all over the place in subject matter and in approach.

"Long after the Storm", silverpoint drawing

It reminds me how one responds to places and situations in such varied ways. There seems, certainly in my case, to be some unspoken dialogue that goes on subliminally between what one's eyes are seeing and what one instinctively senses could become a drawing or a painting. It is almost beyond cogent thought. You just "know" that that will be a subject worth trying to tackle. It usually ends up humbling one, resulting in a somewhat different result that one visualised... in essence, the subject dictates the whole process. Scouting for possible subject matter is always initially instinctive. Only after one has decided that there is something there to be explored does one try to analyse what exact medium to use and how to go about actually physically doing the artwork. Often this whole process is rapid, because when working plein air, you know that the whole thing is fleeting. Light will change, the tide will alter, the birds will fly off, people might come along to fill the empty scene or whatever...

In any case, I found so many things of fascination to try and draw or paint. These three drawings I am posting are just examples. The Cedar Tree posted above, in silverpoint, was the crown of a huge old tree that had been blown down many years ago and was lying, burnished and reduced to its core, in deep marsh grasses. Sapelo Dunes was an early morning silverpoint study of the different parts of the dunes facing the restless waves that aided the wind to shape these dunes. Holding the sand against these forces, the sea oats cling tenaciously, their roots amazingly long and lying exposed at the eroded face of the dunes. The third drawing is a graphite drawing done as the sun was setting on the wide sweep of low-tide beach, the light glinting on the marvellous ridges left in the sand by the water's motion. I was racing the light and only had a very short time before darkness fell. No time for thought, just a fascination to try and make something of nature's marvellous complexity in Low Tide Tracery.

"Sapelo Dunes", silverpoint drawing

Low Tide Tracery". graphite drawing

Gifts of the Moment II

I wrote yesterday of my magical day drawing, with the added incentive of Sketchcrawl, truly a worldwide day of drawing. (www.sketchcrawl.com/forum) Each of us, in our own environment of choice, records and celebrates different drawing media. I was mainly using graphite. These were some of the small drawings I did.

The small drawings were all done along a wonderful saltwater

creek near my home. The marshes are wide flung to islands, and the high ground is fringed with majestic old trees that have seen much history.

The Eye of the Art Collector

Thanks - once again! - to ArtDaily.org's listings, I happened on an up-coming Sotheby's sale of old Master Drawings from a private collection. I spent a fascinated hour on their site, going through the E-Catalogue of the drawings, some eighty of them, the ideal occupation for a dark, rainy day.

It is always extremely interesting to view a collection of art formed by one person, particularly a person who has a trained eye and knowledge of the media involved. I quote from the news release about this collector (who apparently spent about 25 years assembling this collection). "In his very personal forward to the sale catalogue, the collector who assembled this remarkable group of drawings wrote that he embarked on collecting “with the bold aim of looking over the artist’s shoulder”. There can be no question that he succeeded in this aim. The light that these extremely varied studies shed on the artistic creative process is both intense and wide ranging: we see every moment in the artist’s thought process revealed and illuminated."

There is a remarkable energy and life evident in the drawings this collector assembled. The artists are clearly in the throes of excitement and creativity. Famous names or not, it does not matter. The hallmarks of these drawings are immediacy, directness, sureness of touch and stroke. The collector does indeed describe well what he sought - and found - when he selected these works. Different media, different subject matter, some clearly well thought-out and planned, others on the spur of the moment, catching images almost on the fly... Some as aide-mémoires, others as exploration. In short, the collection came across to me as a most interesting selection of artists' emotions, desires, endeavours, aims... running a gamut of approaches and techniques. Little interesting items too, such as remarks about an exquisite study of a seated woman by Jean-Antoine Watteau. "It was executed in a combination of media that Watteau used only occasionally, but to striking effect: the majority of the figure is built up with a network of silvery strokes of graphite (a very rare medium in Old Master Drawings), (my emphasis) while the accents in the face and hands are in a more typical red chalk, an extremely effective juxtaposition that creates a lively yet utterly elegant figure."

When you go back and try to find out about the use of graphite before the early 18th century, it is indeed hard, as a neophyte, to find allusions to many graphite drawings. Pure graphite, first mined in Borrowdale, England, in the 1500s, seems initially to have been used for under drawing in the 16th century. It was more forgiving than metalpoint, especially silverpoint, the draughtsman's favoured medium during Renaissance times in spite of silverpoint's linear qualities and permanence of mark. Graphite does not seem to have been used much for drawing until well into the 17th century. Artists tended to favour chalks, red and black, as well as charcoal for studies and finished drawings alike. (Interestingly, the Venetian artists continued to favour black chalk, whilst the perhaps more flamboyant Florentine and Roman artists preferred the harder red chalk with which they could show off their skills!) Graphite became widespread only in the 18th century, with the increasing difficulty of obtaining good-quality natural chalks and the simultaneous production of a fine range of graphite pencils after the invention of a graphite pencil in Nuremberg in 1662.

Graphite drawings then become far more widespread: John Constable, Jongkind and later John Singer Sargent, for example, all used graphite in their work, particularly when working plein air. Ingres was famed for his use of hard graphite pencils when drawing his wonderful detailed portraits of people. By the turn of the 19th century, Cezanne and so many others commonly used pencils, as have we all done since in the art world - often to great effect.

But back to the Sotheby E-Catalogue of the drawings that occasioned my little foray into the rarity of Old Master graphite drawings... (and by the way, the definition of Old Masters in Western art is work executed before 1800...), it is well worth going through this collection of images of drawings. It allows one to remember how interesting it can be when one sees an art collection formed by one person with the courage of his or her own convictions and erudition.