Art as Memory Stored

It is always fascinating to leaf through a drawing book or a travel journal of sketches.  Immediately the sights and sounds associated with each work come back to one's mind, the magic carpet transporting one to deep shady woods, brilliantly sunlit docksides, wide marsh vistas...

Memories came flooding back for me today as I bade farewell to a silverpoint drawing, Come into my Garden! that I did a while ago.  It was purchased during a juried exhibition, "Art in the Low Country", at the Averitt Center for the Arts in Statesboro, Georgia.

This is a reasonably large work, 16.5 x 15" image, with a toned ground to evoke the wonderful colours of lichen. Highlights are in white gouache, in the way that the Renaissance masters emphasised light when they used tinted grounds for their metalpoint drawings.

Remembering the sultry day I went to find branches festooned with the delicate lichen suddenly made me feel hot again as I thought back to the beginnings of this drawing.  I knew I wanted to weave together aspects of late summer in coastal Georgia, when the wonderful golden orb-weaver spiders have woven their webs into such amazing feats of resilient engineering. The lichen seems similarly tough, with all its different varieties growing on live oak branches.  Their quiet existence, like that of the spider's, goes along mostly unnoticed by humans.  Somehow, silverpoint's fine lines seemed to match these late summer beauties, evolving as they do as the silver tarnishes slowly, and yet amazingly long-lived like them.

Silverpoint allows a close and detailed study of nature's complexities.  Executing such a drawing built into it memories that endure for me of a happy, fascinated late summer as I sat enthralled by the sophisticated designs of lichen and spider web.  Good memories to have!

Learning to See Things Accurately

Saturday was one of those days when it was so misty at one point that one could hardly see anything across the marshes at Dunham Farms, Midway, Georgia. Within a couple of hours, however, it was brilliant sunshine and the world was transformed. It all made one stretch as an artist working outdoors!

I thought of a remark that Michael Gormley had written about the artist, Bo Barlett, in an American Artist article in the March-April 2011 issue. He reported about Barlett that, "Like many other artists, he notes that looking and learning to see things for what they really are (my emphasis), rather than seeing a projection of a preconceived mental concept, is key to the development of a visual language."

Barlett's observation is so true for all of us as artists. I found that as I peered through the mist to try and see accurately, it became a series of surprises. What I saw first, in the scene above (Edge of the Creek, Dunham Farms, graphite), were indistinguishable silhouetted lines of distant horizons. I looked harder, and finally began to see individual small islands and different trees edging the marshes.

The same thing later occurred when I wanted to draw the wood storks perched on a dead tree on a distant island. The birds moved constantly, the wind riffled the palmettos and their fronds were a maze of lines and ever-moving shapes. It was a real challenge even to make any sense of the scene, let alone create a drawing. (At left, Dunham Farms, Midway - wood storks, graphite.)

Another effort of intent observation, later in the day when the sun allowed one to see better in the forest, was trying to follow the myriad lines and patterns in a magnificent old dead live oak tree trunk. Time had distilled the upright trunk to rhythmic sinews, an endless maze of movement. Its patterns and rhythms fascinated me, but I found it really challenging to sit and concentrate on following its ways whilst trying to create a sensible drawing. (At right, Live Oak Rhythms, Prismacolor).

Every time that I go out to work plein air, I am reminded of how difficult it actually is to look really hard and see things accurately. It is a siren call to assume one knows what is going on in the scene in front of one. It is so much easier to think one knows. Only when I remind myself to look again and again, with my eyes really open, do I discover that Nature is once again liable to fool one. In other words, a facile, preconceived "visual language" would not necessarily be an accurate one that reflects one's artistic voice.

Revisiting "a Sense of Place"

I live in a place where trees - live oaks, red cedars and pines of many types - are a wonderful characteristic. They grace the area with shade and distinction, they offer shelter to innumerable birds and animals and they ensure a cool green world even when temperatures are soaring elsewhere. I have grown to love many of them as individuals, whom I have watched grow in size and majesty over the years.

It was thus with horror and desolation that I rounded a corner this week, on a walk, to find men with huge machines finishing the cutting down and annihilation of some of the most wonderful old. and healthy, pines in the neighbourhood. They apparently "obstructed" the view for a new house, and although they had existed for many a long year, they were cut down in a matter of minutes. One of them had become a particular friend for I had done a large pastel drawing of it.

When you sit and draw something as complex as a tree, you learn of its elegantly logical growth, the marvels of engineering which ensure that its branches can reach out to catch the sunlight and yet remain at an angle that is stable for the whole "edifice" of the tree. You also can get a serious crook in the neck, as I found in this case, as the pine tree was so tall. Another delight, as one sits quietly, grappling with the drawing, is that all the birds, raccoons, snakes or other denizens, just come and go about their own world and ignore you.

My sense of this area has been violated this week, alas. Now I have to readjust, mourn the passing of wonderful creations, and move on. I wonder how many other people regard the cutting down of wonderful, healthy trees in the same fashion? But I am glad that at least I tried to record one of the trees in a drawing.