Pouring your Life into your Art

Whether you like it nor not, your art is often the reflection of who you are and where life has taken you. That may be an unnerving idea, but it seems to be one that most artists, in all disciplines, have to come to terms with.

“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved,” wrote Ansel Adams. And for photography, you can substitute any art form, from dancing to singing to visual arts or theatre.

Images of Sacha Copland dancing on a wine barrel at La Porte Peinte residency in Noyers, France, as she choreographs a new work, The Wine Project, tells us about all her past experiences and ideas. As she herself writes about The Wine Project, "There in the glass was the soil of a place and in that soil was a soul”.

Sacha Copeland, Artist Director, Java Dance Company, New Zealand (photograph courtesy of Emma Hellowell)

Sacha Copeland, Artist Director, Java Dance Company, New Zealand (photograph courtesy of Emma Hellowell)

Sacha Copeland, Artist Director, Java Dance Company, New Zealand (photograph courtesy of Emma Hellowell)

Frequently, the artist has little awareness of what is going into the art being created, if that small inner voice is in charge. It is only later that one realizes that there is a wonderful circularity in what is happening, a reason and its result, direct and obvious or much more subtle. It may be years and years later that something seen, something experienced comes floating up and into the art.

I began to realise, for instance, that my childhood exposure, on walls of my home in Tanzania, to Japanese woodcuts, wonderful prints that had been created after the 1923 earthquake in Yokohama, Japan, was the reason for my always feeling comfortable with negative spaces reaching all four sides of a piece of paper. Drawing or watercolours, it does not matter: I feel almost compelled to use the entire surface of the paper, edge to edge, to create “dis-balanced” spaces that play into the whole composition. To me, it is part of my concept of art-making; I feel very strange when I confine the work I am creating to the inner parts of the paper, leaving blank space around the image.

Marronniers III: Chestnut Bark, gold-silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

Le Chant des Pierres III: la Bourgogne Profonde, gold-silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

To me, the richness of art forms resides to a great degree on all these inner layers of life experience that the artist brings to the act of creation. Sometimes you capture and understand them, sometimes you don’t. There, again, part of the fascination of art is how each of us completes the dialogue of the art work.In other words, sometimes that artist’s life experiences resonate with the viewer. Sometimes they don’t because the viewer has had a radically different life and finds it difficult to find bridges stretching across to the artist’s world.

The question that lingers at the back of my mind is: what happens as present-day ever-accelerating giant changes in technology, urbanization, life styles and cultural mores show up more and more in art forms?

Do these changes create huge divergences in art and its adherents, particularly between generations? Or do we continue to acknowledge that certain art, in whatever form, transcends generations and centuries because the richness and power of its content and message? And, ultimately, who amongst us is the arbiter of the enduring character of that art? The super-wealthy buying at art auctions, the more “humble” supporters of all forms of art, governments and/or non-profit art organisations funding the arts, or who?

I wonder if Ansel Adamsthought of those “down-stream” aspects of art-making as he created his wonderful photographs.

When the weather gods decree otherwise!

There are definitely times when plein air yields to the weather gods - my eagerly anticipated sojourn on Sapelo Island is off, victim of the steady downpours we have all been - or will be - experiencing along the Atlantic coast. Ah well! Maybe in January.

Meanwhile, in between battling with computers to prepare art exhibition proposals (when the main computer gives up the ghost, courtesy of local inept computer "experts"), I am being constantly reminded of the elegant circularity of events in life. The links that come around, even fifty years later, to make a coherent, constructive addition to present life, always surprise and delight me. They are frequent enough that they require exploration in silverpoint drawing(s), I think. And the important theme running through all these is longevity - you have to live long enough to see the links and re-links happening. The Chinese symbol of longevity is the bamboo - how suitable and elegant. The bamboo family is amazingly diverse, but universally beautiful. The Chinese and Japanese brush paintings and prints of bamboos come always to mind as somehow the light and shade, delicacy and strength and the restraint in foliage have been so wonderfully recorded over the centuries by their artists. An image, for instance from the amazing collections from the Ten Bamboo Studio, shows bamboo leaves drawn with a single line with fine, fine branches. It is so remarkable that you can almost hear the wind rustling through the leaves.

The Studio of the Ten Bamboos produced an album of woodcuts, images engraved on wooden plates and then printed, which is regarded as the most successful example of printing in the 17th century in China. The master engraver, Hou Yue-ts'ong, turned to art after serving in government in Nanking. He gathered a group of painter friends and together, they composed an album of the works of famous artists.Working in the Studio of the Ten Bamboos, they started work probably in 1619 to create this album with its eight parts. Printing the images in one, two or three colours, they grouped up to twenty images in each section, under the headings - fruits, birds, bamboos, stones, etc. Poems were paired with the images too. The first complete opus of more than 180 illustrations and the same number of pages of text apparently appeared in 1643. Alas, no complete editions remain but those that do are regarded as marvels. The publisher himself described the books as "a marvel of calligraphy... The paintings are poems, and the poems are paintings. They bear the spirit and the reflection of nature..."

Bamboo in Snow -- Illustration from the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual of Calligraphy and Painting (Shizhuzhai shuhua pu), Hu Zhengyan [Hu Cheng-yen], Chinese (c. 1582 -1672) (after 1732, before 1703), (Image courtesy of the Harvard Art Museum)

The Manchu invasion of Nanking saw Hou Yue-ts'ong's workshop burned and many of the album's plates destroyed. Plates were re-engraved and the album was later reprinted in both China and Japan, but never again were the woodcuts of such high quality in the later editions. Thus the early editions, such as the one I alluded to of the bamboo, are held in very high esteem. Some of the prints are held at the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and others in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Having planted bamboo myself and watched them grow - slowly and majestically - it seems only appropriate if I can use them in silverpoint drawings exploring longevity and the magical circularity of life. Now, if I can get the time.

Back to Basics

Reading an article in this month's Art + Auction about "Artists - Back to the Future" about a recently-noted trend of artists and their collectors returning to simpler, more personally-executed and handcrafted creations, I was struck by the statement: " Just because there is a simplicity in means does not mean the process or results will be simple. It's this question of how do we get back to basics by going a very, very long distance. It's a balance between immediacy and complexity" (Massimiliano Gioni, curator of the New Museum, New York).

I started thinking about how I personally would define basics and the balance between immediacy and complexity. I realised that for me, the answer was very simple - I only have to look at Japanese or Chinese art of past centuries, woodcuts or brush paintings in particular. Perhaps I should initially admit to a predisposition to Japanese art: I grew up with Japanese woodcuts on the walls of my home in East Africa. They were part of one set of a huge series of woodcuts that were commissioned after the 1923 earthquake by foreigners living in Yokohama. They were copied from traditional woodcut images, and the objective of this wide-ranging commission was to help the artists get back on their feet after the devastating earthquake and fire. The set with which I lived was very varied but of great beauty and, of course, of especial meaning for me since my grandfather had been one of the people commissioning the Japanese artists.

Snake Gourd, woodcut, after Seitei Watanabe

That said, I have later learned that the essence of simplicity in art does indeed require enormous skill and sophistication of mind and hand. I find that some of the hand scrolls, paintings and screens of the Momoyama and Edo periods in Japanese art (1573-1615 and 1615-1868 respectively) are the essence of aesthetic simplicity and oh so utterly beautiful. Many years ago, there was a truly wonderful exhibition and Harry Abrams catalogue publication, "Birds, Beasts, Blossoms and Bugs. The Nature of Japan". I frequently dip back into this publication because I find it of enormous inspiration and nurture, reminding me, particularly for silverpoint drawing, that as long as I really, really know the subject matter I am drawing, less is really, definitely more.

An example of such basic mastery is, for instance (and very a-propos with our autumnal migrating flocks of crows streaming noisily past our windows), a series of three ink paintings with wash on paper of crows, "Snow, Moon and Flower". One, " Crow in flight before the Moon", by Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795), is just a deftly detailed crow silhouetted in flight with the moon half delineated in white behind him - so minimalist it is breath-taking. And one has to remember this is a brush painting in ink - no room for hesitations, erasures, or even running out of ink at the wrong moment. Certainly one definition of "immediacy". Another of these paintings is "Crow on a Plum Branch" by Matsumura Goshun (1752-1811): the bird perches on the branch in simple, believable reality, yet he is pared down to only the essential detail. The plum branch is reduced to a shorthand suggestion which, nonetheless, is entirely complete in its depiction.

Crow on snow-covered Plum Branch, Kawanabe Kyosai, 1870----1880s, Colour woodblock print, (Image courtesy of the RISD Museum)

Another wonderful six-fold lacquer screen in the same show was of crows in flocks and gatherings of raucous intensity, just their silhouettes against the gold leaf on paper. It was executed by an unknown artist in the Edo period of the early 17th century, but done by someone who had studied this emblematic bird intensely, in all its attitudes and stances - at a time when there was no photography to freeze flight or movement. It is yet another wonderful example of back to basics – knowing your subject matter thoroughly, having a mastery of your technique and compositional intentions, and just following the age-old tradition of an artist using hand and eye to create images that convey messages of beauty, angst, joy, whatever.