Glorious Metalpoint Drawings

I had a wonderful treat today, to which I had been looking forward. After spending the morning doing life drawing, I went to the Telfair Museum (Savannah, GA) to see the current exhibition, Metalpoint Drawings by Dennis Martin.

I have known about Dennis Martin's extraordinary talent for many years, and his work was included in The Luster of Silver, the survey of contemporary silverpoint drawings that I was involved with at the Telfair in 2006. Now his widow, Denise, has donated a magnificent goldpoint drawing to the Telfair's permanent collection and this exhibition is from her collection of her late husband's work. (He died in 2001 at a very young age.)

The drawings ranged from the huge donated piece, "Girl Laying", 42 x 60 inches in size, to the tiny and intimate, studies of portions of the human anatomy that become abstracts, despite their realism. Most combine gold and palladium (and often deep, intense graphite for backgrounds), but some are goldpoints or, most unusually, palladiumpoint. (Since the generic term, metalpoint, describes the method of drawing/mark-making with a metal stylus, the use of the terms, silverpoint, goldpoint, copperpoint or palladiumpoint, for instance, simply describes the metal used to draw.)

Dennis Martin is, above all, an artist fascinated with the play of light, the gentle, subtle luminosity of skin, white fabrics, silky hair... He used the delicate luster of metals to depict his beautiful wife, Denise, time and time again - with intense love and lyricism. Gold and palladium never become as dark and stark as the graphite he uses, so the intensely dark backgrounds on these jaggedly deckled sheets of paper enhance the glow and ethereal tones of the metal marks made, often in feather-like touches. The large drawings, with thousands of softly cross-hatched marks, obviously took hundreds of hours to complete. Yet they retain a freshness and immediacy that are the hallmark of a superlative artist.

In Martin's case, the realism of his drawings somehow becomes entirely secondary to the play of light and form across the smooth paper surfaces. He also worked in graphite as a main medium, but his fame was derived from his metalpoint drawings. When one takes into account that at the time he was using this medium, there were many fewer artists working in metalpoint than there are now, his perfection in it is even more astonishing. It has the power to draw one in close, to gaze and marvel at each mark he made.

The exhibit is just one room at the Telfair, not well lit because of the old building's historical exigencies. Nonetheless, it is really a special show, with a lyrical quietness that enchants and uplifts. If you are in Savannah before January 30th, 2011, you owe it to yourself to see these drawings. Dennis Martin is a remarkable artist.

"Art ... in every lane"

It is always fascinating to discover the wellspring of artists' sources and inspiration. John Constable once remarked, "My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up."

It is somewhat amazing to realise that he described his art as "limited and abstracted". If you look at a wide array of his paintings in oil and watercolour and his drawings, on a site such as John Constable.org, the overwhelming impression is his close, detailed attention to the flat, wide world of East Anglia.

(The oil sketch of Stoke-by-Nayland, at left, courtesy of John Constable.org is an example of his plein air work in this countryside.)

Suffolk, where he was born and mostly lived, is open to the blustery winds off the North Sea, with clouds banks shadowing the wide fields, tree-lined lanes and stretches of water (such as the Water Meadows near Salisbury, done about 1820, at right, courtesy of John Constable.org). Constable never forgot his rural surroundings, but he certainly did not show them to be limited... Abstracted, maybe, but not in the sense we tend to use "abstraction" today.

I find that it is indeed rewarding to go for a walk in our quiet neighbourhood along the riverside and by the marshes. Here too, there are always sources of ideas for drawings and paintings, and even though I know the area very well, the changes of season and light make everything fresh each time. And whilst it may be something that no one else notices, I find myself getting all excited about different things and views.

Along our sandy lane is an endless fascination for me: the remains of a cedar tree, clearly once a mighty seer, but now sinews and lace that become a myriad abstractions.

I keep drawing different portions of it in silverpoint. At left is one version of my "art ... in the lane" abstraction, "Cedar Remains". At right is a smaller drawing I have done of "Cedar Lace", also in silverpoint, which I am donating to the Newhall Art Collection, at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, England, for their fund-raising auction in February-March. It should be up on their website in February.

Constable was indeed wise when he went seeking his art "under every hedge and in every lane". We have all benefited ever since.