Trees

It's funny - when you are scrolling though masses of art images, there is sometimes one that stops you, grabs you and makes you investigate carefully. This happened to me the other day when I was trying to find out more about the Iranian poet and artist, Sohrab Sepehri, who lived from 1928 to 1980. His poems are beautiful, but it was his paintings that interested me.

He apparently had a love affair with trees all his life and did the most wonderful renditions of their trunks. (At left, Trees, 1970, image courtesy of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection.) He spent time in the early 1960s in Japan and was very much influenced by Japanese art, especially woodcuts, and Japanese haikus. He later had a very successful international career in art, and spent time working on a series that he called The Tree Trunk Series.


Apparently shy and retiring, Sepehri found a means of expression, as a painter, in his renditions of trees and landscapes, using soft brush strokes and a restrained palette to create these semi-abstracted portraits of trees that are very arresting, yet somehow very specific to place and implying great space beyond the canvas. On the right is a huge canvas, painted in 1978-79, is called House of Kashan and on the left, below, is an earlier work in the Tree Series. As was commented in an auction catalogue on Arcadja, "To him the tree was a symbol of benevolence and stability in a world corrupted by ignorance and malice, his majestic portrayals capture absolutely the quiet grandeur of ancient forests and harbour an undeniable mystical quality." Painting trees kept him anchored in a world in which he felt very comfortable, particularly when he had to deal with places like Manhattan, in which he felt very alien.


I suppose these paintings and the commentaries I have been able to read about Sepehri's optic on trees, both in his writings and in his art, all resonate with me, because I too love depicting trees. I find each one to be utterly individual, powerful and very much worth of a portrait. I realised that I keep returning to trees as subject matter, especially for my drawings in graphite and especially silverpoint, because I was selecting work to put up on another website to which I was invited this week. Since one travels in hope in life, this site is apparently aimed at designers and decorators - who knows! Nonetheless, my making a selection of art led me to posting a series of tree images.


What is always so interesting is to see how each artist approaches interpretation of trees. Since we all bring our life experience to the art-making, that is logical. The main point is to celebrate trees!

Silverpoint Drawing

At times, there is a wonderful bonus to being an artist and specialising in a medium - it brings together a community of like-minded artists. It becomes, in essence, a celebration.



This happened to me this weekend in the silverpoint drawing world. A friend of mine, whom I had met first by Internet and then in person at The Luster of Silver survey of contemporary silverpoint drawing at the Evansville Museum of Art, Evansville, IN, came to visit me with her charming husband. Marjorie Williams-Smith, an exquisite silverpoint draughtswoman, drove from Little Rock, Arkansas, with her equally talented, master printer husband, AJ. The main purpose of the visit was to see the work I am doing, more and more, in silverpoint on a black ground versus a white or tinted ground. Marjorie obtained a grant to explore this dimension of the medium of silverpoint/metalpoint, and chose me as one of her "subjects" A huge compliment.



For me, as an artist very much working on my own in a rural part of the world, sharing ideas and "talking shop" with other artists, particularly in this rarified medium of silverpoint, is a real event. This weekend visit was indeed fascinating, as each of us has a different approach to drawing in silver on a black ground. We agree that one needs to have one's head go into reverse, as it were, since lights become darks, and the silver marks on the black ground are scintillating but very subtle. Choice of subject matter is different from the usual luminous versions of things in traditional silverpoint on a white ground. The few other artists we know who are working on black tend to work abstractly because it is such a challenge to make the delicate silver line visible. In real life, you can see the shimmer; in digital form, that is lost.

For instance, this drawing of "Posidonia", a wonderful Mediterranean sea grass, has much more of the feel of undulating fronds in real life as you look at the drawing.

What Trees tell me

I realise that I am extremely lucky often to be surrounded by very beautiful trees, of very different types according to where I am in the world. I can quite understand why people worshipped trees and why today, there are so-called tree-huggers.

There is a majesty and serenity inherent in a large tree, something that dwarfs human presumptions and quiets one's fears. Their trunks tell of their capacity for endurance, adaptation and survival; their shapes tell of past influences of weather, treatment by man or animal, drought or abundance of rain and nutrients. This huge beech, growing in Givhans Ferry State Park in South Carolina, spoke to me insistently, in the cold spring light. Before long, as I was drawing this in graphite, I was totally at peace, unaware of anything save the tree.

Every time I find myself drawing or painting a tree, I remember s remark that Paul Cezanne apparently made: "Art is a harmony parallel with nature". In the case of trees, as wonderful representatives of nature, they help me achieve a degree of harmony and serenity that is a huge gift. When I perched uncomfortably on a very hard rock to draw this Aleppo Pine on Palma de Mallorca's outskirts, I was oblivious of the curious looks given me by people walking their dogs. I was somehow in harmony with this luminous tree that spoke of times when Palma was not such a sea of concrete.Drawing in silverpoint seemed appropriate for it had the same wonderful luster.



This is another silverpoint drawing of an Aleppo pine, growing far up on the mountains above the city of Palma, where the view takes one far over the sea to the neighbouring island of Ibiza. The driving winds are shaping this pine, as it clings to the rocky mountainside. But it somehow seemed timeless.



These rugged pine trees, growing on a windswept ridge in Brittany, were equally "eternal" in feel, as I sat in a ploughed, muddy field to draw them. Farmers were passing with huge trailers full of manure to fertilise their fields, and they gave me some very curious looks. The crows were calling far overhead in the soft luminously grey sky. It was a time when my art did indeed provide me a passport to a "harmony parallel with Nature".

This quiet that comes to one as one works outside en plein air is especially magical. Nothing else seems temporarily to matter - just the dialogue between what one is trying to depict and one's hand working on the surface of the paper. Yet one hears bird song, the sound of the wind, different calls of humans or animals - but as a backdrop only. It is somehow a different experience to when one is deep in work in the studio, perhaps because of the vagaries of the weather and surroundings. Another aspect also comes into play when trees are the subject matter: they are intensely, logically complicated in their form and growth, and somehow one has to sort that all out, without depicting every single branch or leaf. Each type of tree is totally individualistic, and I liken drawing each one to doing a portrait of a person.

Perhaps, however, one is more likely to be in harmony with trees than with a fellow human being that one is drawing or painting? Who knows!

The Awareness of Time

While I was out drawing in the glorious sun we had today, I suddenly remembered an interesting statement I read last year in a March 31st entry on ArtDaily.org. It was made by artist and film-maker Lutz Becker, then Curatorial Fellow at Kettle's Yard in the United Kingdom. He curated a major exhibition at the De la Warr Pavilion in 2010, including 20th century experimental films, drawings and prints, that underscored two major trends in drawing, the gestural and the geometric.

Writing about his curatorial choices, he said, "It is the awareness of time as the measure of the distance between thought and realisation, of the value of the transient and sense of the fragility of the inspirational moment, that made me decide to show predominantly works on paper, drawing... no longer about the recording of appearances,, but as a language reflecting its own becoming, often daring and experimental."

He was describing, in probing terms, the way I have been feeling as I explore the new vocabulary of drawing in silverpoint on a black surface. Since it is a version of silverpoint that seems to lend itself to more abstract drawings, more experimental ventures, I have been seeking subjects that talk to me in this language. Today, I was drawing a favourite dead cedar stump, a sprawling amazing sculpture that changes constantly as the light moves around it.

The awareness of time has always been a source of fascination and amazement to me as soon as one starts to draw or paint. Time becomes meaningless. But the fact that time could be "the measure of the distance between thought and realisation" is very perceptive, particularly when one is working plein air. Today's silverpoint needed to be done instinctively, basically without the time for any conscious thought. There would be time, later, for evaluation. It was more important simply to draw, to make marks that mattered. To listen to "inspiration" rather than any reason...

Silverpoint, in a way, is always such a leap of faith. You have to start somewhere, and then just go with whatever happens, fleeting and fragile as the moment may be. Since you cannot erase anything, the notion of time has to disappear, except in one respect. Since you cannot achieve real darks immediately, as you can with graphite, for instance, you have to wait for the silver mark to oxidise, and then you can go back in to emphasise more that dark. But that perception of time is more a pause in the rhythm of drawing, of mark-making, than any real awareness of a clock ticking away.

Silverpoint, to my mind, fits perfectly Lutz Becker's description of drawing "no longer about the recording of appearances, but as a language reflecting its own becoming....", when time has little meaning.

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!

Changing Vocabularies in Art

Recently, a dear friend and truly wonderful artist, Susan Schwalb, galvanised me into doing something that I had been thinking about since my mother's death: drawing in silver on a black background, versus a white ground.

I had been feeling that perhaps a series of drawings in black might help deal with my mother's absence. So when I was in Spain, I prepared some small pieces of paper and launched myself into a new version of silverpoint. It soon became a fascinating exercise, for in essence, you suddenly change your visual thinking and vocabularly completely. You need not only to reverse everything, but detail of course disappears on the black ground unless you are very careful. So you need to select subject matter very carefully. I am still very much feeling my way, but it is a reinvigorating challenge!

I decided to do a series entitled Apoyos which is "supports" in Spanish. My mother loved trees; they were her literal and metaphorical supports on many occasions.

So I drew the bark of different trees she cherished, from a wild coffee tree grown from a seed from our farm in Africa (on left), to a graceful elm (on right), to a Mediterranean pine she loved and laughed about (at left).I had transplanted it as a seedling, in preparation for a bonsai pine. It is now nearly forty foot high!


Each of these drawings is tiny, only 5 x 3.5 inches, but they helped me center myself and remind myself that there are so many different ways to express oneself in art.

Drawing from Life

In a period that has been over-busy with the other side of art - matting, framing and preparing for exhibitions - life drawing was a welcome break, albeit for only three precious hours.

A fellow artist was talking to me during one of the brief breaks to let the model remember his limbs existed.... We were talking about the humbling but ever-necessary discipline of looking, looking and looking, to teach one's hand to trust one's eye in the drawing process. The conversation then moved on to the ever-interesting necessity often faced in life drawing: reconciling the slight changes in pose that even the best model has during the session.

In short poses, it does not matter. For those, the challenge is more to analyse quickly the pose and sort out how to tackle understanding the arms and legs being - often - in somewhat strange positions and how to depict the figure. that can sometimes be very challenging, particularly if there is a lot of foreshortening on limbs relative to where the artist is placed.

During longer poses, models settle into a position but then may tire, slump, move slightly... Depending where one is in the drawing process, these changes can be hard to reconcile. Nonetheless, as my fellow artist remarked, even the evident changes in the drawing make for a much more vibrant and alive work, as compared with the "perfect" work done when someone is drawing from a photograph. In fact, redrawn lines, correcting and modifying the drawing, are frequently a source of strength and interest in a work.

Silverpoint, of course, is one of the least forgiving drawing media for these modifications and corrections, because every alteration shows and nothing can be erased. Yet here again, it can strengthen the image. Two works from some of the greatest silverpoint draughtsmen during the Renaissance illustrate this point. On the left is a hauntingly beautiful study Leonardo da Vinci drew. Look at the reiteration of lines on the left side of the neck. They strengthen the impression of solid support for the detailed face and head, adding stability and emphasis. Likewise, the right hand drawing, Standing Youth with his hands behind his back, and seated Youth Reading, by Filippino Lippi,(http://www.metmuseum.org/), has many lines which are repeated and altered as he readjusted the contours of both youths' arms, for instance, and even the seated youth's knee is redrawn, with felicitous emphasis.

Such works make me feel much better about corrections I make when I am drawing from life, whether it is from models or from something in nature. Today's emphasis on "perfection" - reaching for the eraser, or copying almost slavishly from a photo, can often vitiate a drawing.
None of us is perfect, so why should we expect works of art to be any different?

Metalpoint's Voices

Sometimes, when I am working in silverpoint - or metalpoint, when I include gold or copper in the drawings - I find that there is a wonderful parallel to music and musical instruments in these shimmering lines.  Perhaps my imagination runs away with me - who knows!

I find that the pure, simple line produced by silver being passed over a surface prepared with ground reminds me of the ineffable beauty of a boy's soprano voice as it floats out into Gothic vaults and dies away to a whisper.



Perhaps  a drawing like Solitaire, Wild Acres could illustrate what I mean for the silver lines are essentially simple.  As I drew this image, the mountain air was crisp and thin, again a suitable parallel to a soprano voice.

When the silver lines are more sustained and yet their delicacy is evident, silverpoint reminds me of violins.  The range and subtlety of this instrument is echoed in silverpoint's capabilities.  This drawing, Balsam Mountain Beech, shows some of these characteristics and was great fun to "orchestrate" as the leaves curled more and more as they dried out during the time I drew them.

Silverpoint allows for deeper, complex tones, such as those of a violoncello.  Sometimes the choice of ground for the paper surface will allow these darker, more sonorous voices to emerge from the silver lines, just as the cello sings in that wonderful lower register.  A Day at Manassas Bog allowed me to explore this aspect of silverpoint, for the subject matter, all dried plants, seemed to resonate with deep memories of past seasons.

Even the sound of a human whisper has a parallel, I feel, in some ways of using silverpoint.  Often whispers go from soft to loud, or vice versa.  They seem staccato, truncated, random, muffled ... at times.  This  drawing, Mist on the River, made me think of whispered voices carrying on the river Edisto as I sat quietly on the bank, early one fresh spring morning.

Perhaps I am being more fanciful than ever, but a drawing like Grevillea makes me think of a piano playing.  The Grevillea tree is so wonderful in its silver-white to dark green-black and its pulsating energy sets up rhythms and harmonies that seem to echo those one hears so often, with delight, from a piano being skilfully played.  The leaves are sturdy, yet light, and the branches tough and resistant - similar to aspects of the piano, an instrument of such versatility. 

My last "interpretation" of silverpoint's voices: when all the lines are working, some light, some dark, some deep, some quiet, but all in miraculous harmony, then one can perhaps think of the drawing as paralleling an orchestra playing.  Rhythms, pauses, simple passages and complex moments... a drawing can have those aspects that one finds also in an orchestra.  Fallen Palmetto, while I was drawing this complicated pattern, made me think of such an orchestral performance.

Sometimes, drawing can become even more fun to do when one imagines other aspects of the medium.  I love listening to all the voices that silver, gold and copper can produce.  It enriches the whole experience of drawing in metalpoint.

Negative Spaces

I found an interesting comment recently: "It is the complexity of melody which makes music beautiful, just as negative spaces make a painting work. When next at the easel, remember we are making music for the eyes". Mary Kilbreath, a wonderful artist who paints in oils, made this remark. When you look at her paintings, she does indeed use negative space wonderfully.

I have always been fascinated by the power and necessity of negative space. Perhaps

my childhood spent with Japanese wood cuts hanging on many of the walls of our home had something to do with my love affair with it. For example, this is a wonderful Hokusai study of The Dragon of Smoke emerging from Mt Fujiyama.

Negative space in art is the empty space between delineated objects, the area where the eye can rest. It allows a very strong underlying composition to be woven into a drawing or painting, directing the eye around the art in subtle fashion. It allows a rhythm between the positives and negatives, similar to what Mary Kilbreath was saying about music, the pauses and silences highlighting the melody.

The classic demonstrations of negative space usually use pedestalled urns which also read as silhouetted faces, but I found this Moth (courtesy of Donald Mackay) was an interesting way of showing positive and negative in simple fashion.

One of the aspects of using negative space that I relate to very readily - again thanks to the Japanese influence - is ensuring that the composition reaches to all four sides of the paper or canvas.

Carrying shapes and lines to the edges not only implies more space and continuation of the composition beyond the confines of the paper; it also helps break up the composition into more interesting shapes. Negative space thus becomes easier to incorporate into the composition. This is an example of my working to all four sides of the paper: Recovering from Surgery is a silverpoint I did earlier this year. Negative space is part and parcel of the work.

The Music-Art Connection - again!

Last year, I attended a concert in Savannah, GA, where the Emerson String Quartet, with violinist Daniel Hope and friends, played a piece, Terra Memoria, by Finnish composer, Kaija Saariaho. As I sat listening, a series of silverpoint drawings began to dance through my mind’s eye. The results of this concert are slowly becoming reality on paper as I work to draw what I envisaged as the music was played.

Terra Memoria, commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation, was first performed in June 2007 in Carnegie Hall, New York, by the Emerson String Quartet. The music evokes “those departed” and remembered in evolving fashion by the people remaining. My silverpoint drawings, so far three in number, address evolutions in the world between reality and abstraction. There are more still to be done, but it is a series in which I am trying to tell my subconscious to be utterly in charge, and thus I am trying not to think consciously at all as I do these drawings.









Terra Memoria I
silverpoint, goldpoint, graphite






Terra Memoria II
silverpoint, goldpoint, acrylic

Drawing as Thinking

In earlier posts on this blog, I alluded to the exploration and excitement of drawing. But as I try to work on a series of silverpoint drawings I am doing, I realise again how much the act of drawing is a form of thinking. I am working on a series based on a piece of music that I listened to during a Savannah Music Festival concert. The images began to flood into my mind's eye as I heard the music. Now I need actually to work out how I want to construct those images and what I am actually trying to say in the drawings.

Consequently, I am trying to think through the silverpoint stylus, in fact, as I work out the drawing. The exercise makes me think of a really fascinating document I found some while ago - Aesthetic Education, Inquiry and the Imagination, written in 2007 by Madeleine Fuchs Holzer, Director of Educational Development at the Lincoln Center Institute (http://www.lcinstitute.org/wps/PA_1_0_P1/Docs/495-AEII.pdf). In this document, well worth downloading, especially if you are a teacher, nine Capacities for Imaginative Learning are laid out. The first ones, Noticing Deeply, Embodying, Questioning, Making Connections and Identifying Patterns, seem not only very germane for teachers but for artists themselves.

Every one of those concepts helps as one is thinking and/or drawing. If you are drawing something from real life, the level of observation will dictate the level of detail you show in your knowledge and thus portrayal of the subject matter. Even if you later simplify the drawing, or painting, the knowledge you have gained from noticing deeply will enrich and inform the art. The same acquired essence of the subject will permeate the artwork though your embodying it and translating it into the art. A questing curiosity and willingness to venture into unknown realms will lead you to do better art - the questioning part is very much bound up with thinking with the pencil or silver stylus. What if I do this... or that? What will that convey and what effect will it achieve? The same elasticity and openness of mind allows one to remember back to other art seen or done, other experiences, other results; the new work you are thinking about creating will be enriched by the connections you can make as you are developing the art. Even identifying patterns, visually or otherwise, can be a valuable stepping stone to thinking of the best way to go in planning the art.

Ultimately, however, after all the effort put into the initial thinking/drawing stage, there comes the time to launch yourself into what you are being driven to create. And you know full well that along the way, there will be surprises and deviations... and more thought and more drawing... before the work is finished.

Hidden from Sight

Today, when the art materials industry and art instruction world have hugely increased in size, everyone can easily turn to art, either to create or to support its creation. The statistics abound to show what a beneficial multiplier factor the arts are to an area's economy, and the arts are viewed very positively.

It is, however, still, a rather solitary occupation to be an artist. No matter what the discipline, it remains a discipline requiring a person ultimately to produce something. In painting or drawing, for instance, it is mostly the artist's passion which will keep the creation going. In that dedication to creating a work, there is a lot that goes on "behind the scenes". When I conceive of a drawing or painting, there are initially decisions as to the medium (silverpoint drawing or graphite, for instance, or watercolours or acrylics...), the format (horizontal or vertical, large or small...), or is it going to be one piece or one in a series. Once those basic choices are made, there are then the decisions as to how to convey the concept, what to say, how to say it, why is it important?

Studies and exploratory drawings help the preparation. And it is at that stage, often, that the essence of the idea - the essence of a person's character for a portrait, or the spirit of the land in a landscape, for example - becomes paramount. What is "hidden from our sense of sight", as art consultant and author Roger H. Boulet (http://www3.telus.net/rhboulet/rhb_vitae.html) wrote on draughtswoman Ann Kipling of British Columbia, is something that each artist needs to tap into, albeit often unconsciously. Paula Rego (see my blog entry of April 1st) was talking of tapping into this when she talked of the excitement of a voyage into the unknown each time she starts drawing. Intensity of observation, vitality of expression, a willingness to push through to evoke life itself - those are pathways to creation that each artist travels willingly, knowing they are important. And each of us, as artists, recognises that those journeys are lonely but rewarding.

"Washing away the Dust"

Autumn seems finally to be here, with a crisp sunny day that implored one to go out and enjoy it. I managed to get the chores of daily life either done or postponed and went out to draw, feeling a fraction harassed and short of time.

Then - bliss! I settled down to draw a wonderful old oak tree which had split in two. One portion had simply fallen over into the marsh mud, and has now died. But since it is a live oak, the graceful skeleton will remain as a frame for the marshes and salt water creek for many years. It was a peaceful afternoon with just soft bird songs and a gentle Labrador friend who came to greet me with a wagging tail.

I was working in silverpoint, so it was slow and meditative work. The world fell away from me, and by the time I had finished the small drawing, I was feeling much better, albeit a bit weary. I then remembered a wise statement (of the many!) that Pablo Picasso purportedly made. He remarked, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life". He was exactly right.

Catching up with spring

Spring in coastal Georgia comes with such a rush of beauty and imperatives that there is never enough time to celebrate it all. Suddenly there are a myriad subjects to draw in silverpoint, another vast selection to paint in watercolours - and time never suffices.

It is always interesting to return to a subject that one has drawn or painted before; every artist has favourite themes to visit and revisit over time. It is astonishing how a simple flower, such as an azalea, can elicit different reactions and dictate different approaches every time it is drawn or painted. No wonder museums have such diverse collections of paintings and drawings which include and celebrate flowers. Think of the heyday of Dutch flower painting in the 17th century, when so many talented artists followed Jacques de Gheyn II's example. He was one of the earliest artists (1565-1629), who depicted wonderful tulips, roses and other flowers (not all of which bloomed at the same time) to satisfy the demands of the ever-more wealthy Dutch burghers. Since then, Manet, Fatin-Latour, Monet, Renoir, Matisse and so many others have turned to flowers for inspiration again and again.

Perhaps it is because one can see in a flower the basis for realism or pure abstraction - at the same time, really - that it is endlessly interesting as a subject. Added to which, I personally find a serenity and elegant logic to a flower that delight. However, each time, there is a surprise in how the structure works and I am often reminded of Paul Valery's statement: "Until you draw an object, you realise that you have never actually seen it." And so one rushes to catch the fleeting spring glories, to try and "see" them close up and celebrate them - again!

Lines

Lines loom large in all our lives from a very young age. Who hasn't taken a pencil, a pen, even a lipstick, and made energetic, happy scribbles on all sorts of surfaces from early childhood? Those were our drawings, and they often won praise and encouragement.

Later, lines become the underpinning for paintings, the punctuation marks for long columns of additions in arithmetic or the scaffolding for musical notes on a score. So many uses and so many meanings... But for anyone interested in art, a line becomes more and more nuanced and meaningful. Not only does one learn to use line to express oneself in silverpoint, graphite, pen, paint, charcoal or any other medium, but you also see line much more clearly all around you. For me, the contour lines traced out in grassy strips between ploughed fields to prevent erosion on our farm were some of the earliest memories of line. Even an avenue of trees is two parallel lines that speak of time, order, shade, beauty and horticultural skill - another childhood fascination.


When I draw in silverpoint, lines can whisper or speak loudly, in a metaphorical sense. Just like the lines drawn in space by a violin bow as it moves across the instrument, softly, sensuously, vigourously or hesitantly. Or like the traces of an insect when it walks on a sandy surface. I drew this set of tracks on Sapelo Island, Georgia, in the sand dunes (Sand Dune Colony, Sapelo - silverpoint ). When one looks at lines drawn by Albrecht Durer (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer) in a silverpoint drawing, such as those in his 1520-21 Diary of A Journey to the Netherlands, they run the gamut of effect and message. As he records an amazing variety of people, places and things he sees during his trip north, the silverpoint lines show his questing eye, trying to understand the anatomy of a dog, the pattern of a tiled floor, the bone structure of a woman's face... Lines in a drawing can show how the artist's eye, brain, hand and paper surface are connecting together; that is why drawings are so often considered so immediate and fresh.

Frequently lines become like a golden orb spider's magnificent web, linking together in complex fashion to become a drawing, a painting, an architect's structure. Every time we start to work with lines, something unique evolves. A simple line, short, long, interrupted or continuous, can be an amazing creation.

Shadows

I have always loved the way shadows are the underlying abstraction in even the most realistic of paintings or drawings. Perhaps because I have spent so much time in countries where white walls are the most perfect surfaces for shadows, I frequently find them more interesting than their "source objects".

Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Shadows have their boundaries at certain determinable points. He who is ignorant of those will produce work without relief; and the relief is the summit and the soul of painting." He was one of the pioneers of chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark that helps describe an object; before the Renaissance, artists did not depict objects or people using this system of darks and lights. Leonardo's study of hands and arms illustrates his study of the shadows that help define these arms and hands.

What is Leonardo's subtext is his message - look, look, look at what you are depicting. Study the way the light falls on the object. Examine the shadows, the way the shadow is darkest near the object and tapers out as it gets further from the object casting the shadow. Remember to look for the reflected light near the object that is bounced back into the shadow from any light-coloured object, like an egg.

The shadows define the curves and angles of every object, allowing us to understand their configurations - like a visual language whose vocabulary one needs to acquire and practice. As all the light outside comes from the sun, the shadows will move, change, evolve as the sun moves across the sky. Leonardo's Study for the Kneeling Leda, done with bold in hatching, shows what he was talking about in the use of shadows.

Accurate observation of light, and thus shadows, will implicitly tell the viewer what times of day the artist was working, and even indicate at what latitude the painting was done if carefully examined. The constant change in light is one of the main challenges to plein air art. It is a non-stop gallop as one can never work fast enough, it seems, to catch up with the movement of light and shadows. That is where quick sketches indicating shadows and light angles can help greatly later on. The light situation is also one of the main reasons why artists resort to photographs as the shadows are suddenly frozen. Nonetheless, working solely from photos tends to produce airless art, even if it is easier and an artist can control the process a little better than just working plein air.

I am reminded that there is another dimension of this need to look at shadows to find the "relief" for a drawing - at the moment, I am in the middle of doing a silverpoint drawing of ginger lilies, those wonderful, fragrant white butterfly-like flowers. I picked the head with the buds half open. With the indoors warmth, the flowers are opening fast, changing all the time,,, and of course, the plays of lights and darks are constantly altering. Since silverpoint is slow, this is a constant juggling act to keep a coherent composition going, remain reasonably faithful to the flowers and yet use the light and shadows to tell about the graceful forms of these flowers. Using artifical light, even my faithful daylight-accurate Ott Lights, makes the shadows so harsh that it is not appealing, so I am working in daylight.... with its own set of challenges.

Challenges, yes, but Leonardo was right.... the play of light and shadow can be the summit and soul of a piece of art.

Drawing Nature

As I work with other silverpoint artists on finding exhibition venues for contemporary silverpoint drawings, I have had the luck and pleasure to "meet" some truly wonderful artists, even if we have not met face to face. Since, by definition, drawing in silver requires a very sure hand and an appreciation of subtleties of light, form, composition..., these artists are good draughtsmen and women. It is fascinating to see the hugely diverse use of this medium, both in technique and content, especially considering that the technical parameters of silverpoint are narrower and much less flexible than, say, graphite.

One artist friend who deservedly has been garnering much success with his drawings is Timothy David Mayhew. Whilst he does the most magnificent paintings of animals and birds, as well as wonderful small plein air landscapes, it is his drawings that I find breathtaking. Elegant in the extreme, they are done with a variety of old master media and techniques that Timothy painstakingly researched and reconstructed for his personal use. Nature is his master and inspiration. Ever since I first got to know him a little, he has alluded to time spent in different - and often difficult - environments, where he hikes and observes, following animals and birds in their own habitat. The resultant artwork, often done in the field, rings true, because he knows his subject intimately.

Timothy frequently wins both kudos and awards. Recently, for instance, at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, during the "Western Visions" exhibition, he was awarded the Robert Kuhn Award for a drawing entitled Study of a Gray Wolf wading in Water, a natural red chalk drawing. It was apparently a double delight for him as Bob Kuhn had been his friend and mentor, introducing him to drawing live animals together in studio and zoological settings.

Drawing Nature, in all its aspects, is always fascinating but extremely challenging. It requires endurance - there are always insects, heat, wind, sun, rain and humidity, difficult terrain, or a combination of them to deal with! Living creatures don't just stay obligingly still and in view. One needs to work quickly when opportunity presents itself. Once one has got organised on these aspects of art-making, it is often nothing short of a miracle to produce a work of art of consequence. Particularly one that is in silverpoint/metalpoint, chalk or any of the demanding and unforgiving media that Timothy uses.

It is well worth checking out Timothy David Mayhew's work. His drawings sing.

Art and life

Scrolling through the amazing amount of mail received on the Web, I sometimes come across an image of a painting or drawing that stops me in my tracks. Just as when you round the corner in a museum and come face to face with a work of art that takes your breath away...

Yesterday, I was reading the daily Art Knowledge newsletter and there was the image of a painting I had always loved, Rogier van der Weyden's St. Joseph, done about 1445. I know it from having seen it in the wonderful Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, where it is hung with another part of the original altarpiece, the painting of St. Catherine. Her painting is lovely, but it is the tempera painting of St. Joseph which is breathtaking. Van der Weyden depicts an elderly, thoughtful man whose powerful expressiveness is remarkable. His portrait, direct and detailed, even to the whispy stubble on his chin and the lined, reflective face, depicts him three-quarters face, as if he were hesitating and thoughtful just before he turned to face one and say something gentle and considered. The Gothic architecture and slight landscape behind him are neutral and elegantly refined, a perfect complement to the directness of the portrait.

As I gazed at the digital image of St. Joseph, I thought of the quote I had found when Henry Miller wrote that "art teaches nothing except the significance of life". This portrait is a supreme example of that.

The portrait was being reproduced as it is presently being exhibited at the opening exhibition of an enlarged and updated Vander Kelen-Mertens municipal museum in Leuvens, Belgium. The link to Leuvens for Rogier van der Weyden is important - he apparently painted one of his most celebrated pieces there, the Descent from the Cross, another amazing work which is in the Prado, Madrid. Not only did van der Weyden achieve paintings of refinement and luminosity whose human dramas reach out to us across some six and a half centuries, but he also left us a work which I particularly love as a silverpoint artist. At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, there is a wonderful self-portrait as St Luke done about 1440. He is making a drawing for his painting of the Virgin, in a setting he apparently copied from Jan van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. And he is making a silverpoint drawing....something I don't believe was depicted by any other artist.

"Drawing should be like nature..."

Charles Baudelaire, in his statement for L'Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, wrote, "A good drawing is not a hard, despotic, motionless line enclosing a form like a straitjacket. Drawing should be like nature, living and reckless... nature shows us an endless series of curved, fleeting, broken lines, according to an uneering law of generation, in which parallels are always undefined and meandering, and concaves and convexes correspond to and pursue each other."

Today, I was celebrating an incredibly beautiful spring day with friends on a wild and unspoiled barrier island. As we walked along its shoreline, the red cedars and live oaks sprawled towards the marshes, their roots tangled and tenacious. Oyster shells lay glistening white, carpeted above high tide levels by the warm golden russet of freshly fallen live oak leaves. Everywhere I looked, there were joyous, ebullient abstract drawings waiting to be done of the roots of these trees as they twisted and clung, embraced and snaked. Baudelaire could have been thinking of such scenes as he described what a good drawing should be. I am not sure I could live up to the "good" part of his definition, but I do know that I need to return soon to do more silverpoint drawings of this amazing area where marshland meets high ground in reckless turbulent celebration of life and survival.

In truth,I have always loved these tangles of red cedar roots, oyster banks and sunlight, as shown by these are two silverpoints I did in coastal Georgia several years ago. The top drawing is entitled Sunlit Fugue; the lower one is called Tenacity amid the Oyster Shells.

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