Seeing the Marvellous

Flying high above Georgia's hinterland in the dusk, I was watching all details of the land below disappear into soft evening haze. Suddenly, a marvellous swirled flash of silver and golden glints leapt from the darkness below. I gazed enthralled, for it was truly beautiful in its sinuous elegance. Then it was gone - the light and our position in the sky had changed. I later deduced that it must have been the Oconee River in its middle reaches.

The magical image stayed in my mind's eye, and I have finally tried to translate it into a silverpoint drawing – as yet unscanned. But I keep feeling that glimpse of the silvered world far below me was a wonderful, fleeting gift.

The episode made me think of a quote made by the extraordinary French poet, Charles Baudelaire. He said, "We are enveloped and drenched in the marvellous, but we do not see." He is so often correct - we live in a world of haste and stress, rushing from one thing to the next, a life style that often precludes our stopping to savour of something simple, beautiful, uplifting. Yet those moments, when we can perceive the marvellous around us, enrich and anchor our lives.

Charles Baudelaire et le Dessin

Étant donné que je me suis lancée dans la discussion des remarques de Charles Baudelaire sur le dessin, je dois quand même les reporter également en français, puis que la beauté du langage de Baudelaire le mérite. Selon Baudelaire, "un bon dessin n'est pas une ligne dure, cruelle, despotique, immobile, enfermant une figure comme une camisole de force. Le dessin doit être comme la nature, vivant et agité – la nature nous présente une série infinie de lignes courbes, fuyantes, brisées, suivant une loi de génération impeccable, où le parallélisme est toujours indécis et sinueux, o­­ù les concavités et les convexités se correspondent et de poursuivent."

Étienne Carjat, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, circa 1862.

En effet, j'ai repensé à ces remarques pendant que j'essayais de dessiner des paysages et nuages cette après-midi. Les nuages se formaient et se reformaient à une vitesse vertigineuse et tout changeait à chaque instant. Il fallait se concentrer sur la connexion oeil-main et ne pas penser d'une façon consciente pour arriver à faire même un croquis convenable. Baudelaire avait bien saisi l'essentiel de l'acte de dessiner quelque chose.

Baudelaire and Drawing

Charles Baudelaire, who prided himself on his abilities as an art critic, wrote a fascinating description of his concept of drawing for the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris. He said, "A good drawing is not a hard, despotic, motionless line enclosing a form like a strait jacket. Drawing should be like nature, living and reckless – nature shows us an endless series of curved, fleeting, broken lines, according to an unerring law of generation, in which parallels are always undefined and meandering, and concaves and convexes correspond to and pursue one another."

Charles Baudelaire, 1864.

I was thinking about this definition of drawing today as I sat on a dock in the late soft afternoon breezes and tried to capture cloud formations as they waxed and waned in endless energy. Only by letting go of conscious thoughts and just trying to work the eye-hand connection could I get down anything that captured the endlessly majestic procession of the clouds. It was just as Baudelaire described the process of drawing.

"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.

Tenacity amid the Oyster Shells, silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

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.

Sunlit Fugue, silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist