Art and the Perception of Time

An artist residency in a beautiful place such as the medieval village of Noyers sur Serein in Burgundy, France, leads to reflections on how one perceives time. All around in the village are beautiful buildings that date from the 15th century, houses that are still occupied, loved and cared for.

La Porte Peinte, Noyers

Old home and barn, Noyers, photo J. Cook

The lovely church, whose bells sonorously mark the passage of the hours, is visibly marked by the six centuries that it has known.

The 15th century church, Noyers, photo J. Cook

The cobbled streets are a reminder of other ways of transport, inducing strolls along the streets rather than a hurried drive though by car. The village is delineated by its arched entrances and the towers that guarded its confines in more bellicose times of yore, after 1419 when the Dukes of Burgundy held sway, sometimes by force.

Ancient tower guarding Noyers, photo J. Cook

In other words, time in some ways has been held in abeyance. There is the sense that visitors and inhabitants alike can slip backwards through the centuries to earlier, slower times. One's perception of historical time is constantly reinforced, with reminders that man has lived in this village for an extremely long time. Even the peaceful cattle grazing in fields on the village edge reinforce the sense of timelessness.

Cattle grazing just outside Noyers, photo J. Cook

Because the village is small, the sense of unity and harmony is reinforced. Flowers everywhere and walled gardens attached to most houses enhance the desire simply to slow down, delight in the beauty and forget the outside, fast-tempo world. When I was there last week, the Noyers Music Festival, a delight in itself, brought young musicians in for master classes and music floated out of open windows throughout the village as residents opened their homes to the students to practice and lodge. Again, time slowed in delight.

Meanwhile, as an artist, I was busy drawing, hard at work on my venture of trying to marry metalpoint to aspects of Burgundy's monastic and wine-producing history. As every artist knows, as soon as you start trying to create a piece of art, time and its perception become merely an abstraction. You lose all sense of time. The only tempo that I find is imposed on me, as the hours slip by unperceived, is the need to stop to rest my eyes and have a cup of tea and something to eat, to refuel.

The days melted away almost imperceptibly for me. It was a strange sensation, in truth. Whilst drawing, I had absolutely no sense of the passage of the hours. Yet as soon as I stepped outside La Porte Peinte, I was constantly reminded of the other dimensions of time, with so much history visible that marked the passage of centuries. And yet that passage of time is almost frozen in a medieval village that has so carefully preserved its heritage.

So many ways to measure time, all during a magical time creating metalpoint drawings.It seems to me that occasionally, we all need to remember that time need not be marked by the relentless technology of today that corrals us into a frenzied way of life. We risk ending up divorced from aspects of life that bring us peace and joy as they link us to nature and our collective heritage.

Burgundy and Art

It is hard to believe that the days can flash past so quickly, but I have spent four full days already here at Noyers sur Serein at La Porte Peinte for the first part of my artist residency. I flew to Paris and drove across a world of wondrously wide and luminously golden harvested cereal fields. La belle France! The home front finally has calmed a little, with health stable and so I was able to slip away to come here. The exciting events since I arrived – I hung my artwork as part of the overarching exhibit, Quotidiaen, here at the La Porte Peinte gallery. It is metalpoint work that I did as a result of my residency last year which I framed for exhibiting and brought with me. My part is entitled Les Pierres qui Chantent: Dessins en Pointe de Metal.

Les Pierres qui Chantent exhibit, July 2015 - La Porte Peinte, Noyers. Artist Jeannine Cook

Les Pierres qui Chantent exhibit, July 2015 - La Porte Peinte, Noyers. Artist Jeannine Cook

The other exciting news is that indeed I will be able to exhibit work that I am currently producing in the Noyers Museum in September. I am also preparing an informal talk about it all and about metalpoint in general for the Journées de la Patrimoine in September, when France’s wonderful patrimony is celebrated.

So thanks to all my generous friends who helped me reach the Hatchfund funding goal for this residency atLa Porte Peinte,  I am organized!

Now, of course, has come the other aspect of this venture – producing artwork. I have been working hard, perched in my magical eerie above the cobbled main square in Noyers, with the sounds of French, mingled with laughter, that drift up to the open window. The delicious swallows are still flying ceaselessly, calling and swirling as they dart in to feed their babies in their beautiful mud nests attached to the medieval oak beams of the porches and roofs. As I am high up, I see the flash of their white rumps and black wings in their aerial ballet beneath me – the perfect accompaniment to metalpoint’s black and white.

Les Pierres qui Chantent exhibit, July 2015 - La Porte Peinte, Noyers. Artist Jeannine Cook

Les Pierres qui Chantent exhibit, July 2015 - La Porte Peinte, Noyers. Artist Jeannine Cook

I have just finished the third in the initial series of the project drawings – Burgundia – as Burgundy was named from Roman times onwards. I have tried to marry the main themes of the project together – fossilized shells, metalpoint, wine and the “horror vacui” of medieval manuscripts with their lettering in brilliant colour and details of nature covering each page. I managed to photograph one drawing – with complications – as normal scanners will not reproduce all the “whispered” lines in silver. The others will have to await my return home!

Burgundia II. silverpoint-watercolour. Artist Jeannine Cook

Step by step, line by line – what fun!

Thoughts on Crowdfunding for Art Projects

Noyers sur Serein, Burgundy, France

You certainly learn by doing! I decided to do a crowd-funding project on Hatchfund as an experiment, to push out frontiers as an artist and hopefully to give good publicity to a very worthy cause, the artist residences at La Porte Peinte, in Noyers, France.

The first frontier I had to extend was getting into video-making, an area I had not yet visited. I met charming video-makers and although the first video was not what I hoped for, simply because I was utterly inarticulate with 'flu at the time, the second was better because I was more coherent and able to talk.

I am fascinated with the idea I developed - namely to try to marry together the metalpoint monastic heritage that flowered in Burgundy and elsewhere, the wine-producing heritage there and the extraordinary fossilised oyster shells found in stones lying in some Chablis vineyards. It will be a really interesting challenge to weave these strands together into viable art. I suppose that is what art residencies are for - peace and time for experiments!

La diète de salut. France, Burgundy, c. 1490 (Image courtesy of the Morgani Library, New York)

Chablis and vineyards, Burgundy

Chablis Stones containing Fossilised Oyster Shells

However, the other, and perhaps most time-consuming, aspect of my crowd-funding venture has been the actual fund-raising. I clearly had not thought through all the implications of such a project. Nonetheless, I soon found myself sitting down and writing to friends and supporters who have been wonderful enough to collect my art over the years.

I have to say the results have mostly been heart-warming and gratifying. There have of course been days of nothing at all happening, no one even acknowledging my e-mails, but then, out of the blue, comes a short e-mail from Hatchfund saying that such and such a person has supported the project.

Slowly the figures have crept up, until two days ago, I realised with a shock that I had passed the magic threshold mark of the minimum amount needed to fund the project and thus release the funds to me. What a relief!

En route to that point, I have learned a few aspects of this crowd-funding world. The first is distinctly cultural: I realise that a British background of not blowing one's own trumpet and not putting oneself forward does not prepare one well for the necessary soliciting of funds. Americans seem to have no such problems. The second is that the American way seems to require a considerable amount of outright hucksterism, two-for-the-price-of-one department. I think one has to be selective in approaches, depending on the type of project one is trying to promote.

The third and last consideration I have found to be interesting. In an era that supposedly has everyone fully converted to and comfortable with on-line financial transactions, there is still a high proportion of people very reticent indeed about putting a credit card on-line. Cheques still retain a high degree of reliability and safety to many people and on-line fraud is a very real threat.

However, towards the end of the Hatchfund fund-raising period on my Art Residency at La Porte Peinte, I am beginning to feel that it has been a good thing to have done. Mostly because it has given me reason to touch base with friends and supporters with whom I might not have exchanged news and greetings until later in the years. Also too, such a project, willy-nilly, forces one to measure oneself out there in the big, wild world -- and it is always nice to find that it is possible to bob along and keep afloat in the choppy waters of competition.

Thank you all, my generous supporters. And to my other friends from whom I have not heard, I hope to hear from you, especially to hear that your summer is going along happily.

Crowd-Funding with Hatchfund for a Metalpoint-Drawing Residency in Burgundy

I firmly believe that every artist should be open to new ventures, both in creating art and then in finding ways to reach other people who might share a passion for that type of art.  There are always new and potentially fascinating horizons to explore. In that spirit, I have just embarked on a crowd-funding venture with AIM Hatchfund to fund an artist residency at La Porte Peinte, in Noyers sur Serein, Burgundy.  All the details are at the Hatchfund website - both in video form and in text form.

La-Porte-Peinte, Noyers sur Serein, Burgundy, France

Basically I have until 4th July to raise a minimum of $3000 to help defray the costs of going to Noyers to create a body of metalpoint drawings that weave together some fascinating but seemingly disparate aspects of life in Burgundy. Not only was the region a famed centre of monastic production of illuminated manuscripts.

Book of Hours, Paris 1430-35 - March (Image courtesy of the Morgan Library, New York)

Detail of Book of Hours, March. Paris 1430-35 (Image courtesy of the Morgan Library)

Its renown too as a wine-producing region, thanks to those same industrious monks (and the Romans before them!), is sometimes enhanced by vines planted in soils rich in 150 million year old fossilised minute oyster shells that confer a unique “terroir” hallmark, particularly in the Chablis area.

Burgundy -Chablis-Le-Clos (Image courtesy of Mick Rock, photographer)

Chablis Stones 1 small

Chablis, Kimmeridgian stone containing fossilised oyster shells (J. Cook photographer)

The link for me in these two facts? Metalpoint drawing. Metalpoint is a medium born in medieval monasteries where monks used lead styli to delineate illuminations and draw the lines for their beautiful manuscripts. After a chequered history, metalpoint is currently undergoing a third renaissance. My passion for this subtle, shimmering medium dates from the early 1980s. I use mainly gold, silver and copper to make marks on prepared paper; the lines cannot be erased, and silver and copper will evolve in colour as they tarnish, making the medium even more alive.

Huitres de Chablis I , silverpoint-Prismacolor, Jeannine Cook artist

Wine-making, illuminating manuscripts and drawing in silver and other metals are all activities where time has a very different rhythm compared to much of today’s world. We often need reminders that at times, a slower pace of life can bring joy, fascination and quiet rewards. A body of metalpoint drawings can serve as such a reminder.

With those thoughts in mind, I have just uploaded all the required information, video and text to Hatchfund, had the staff approve the contents and make it live. And now I have to hope that other kind people share my optic that travelling though time and different worlds is always fascinating. By making a tax-free donation to this metalpoint drawing project, I would have the pleasure of sending a thank you gift to contributors and then taking them along with me on the path of creating the art, thanks to technology.

Dear reader, share the fun of creation with me!

Burgundy's Stones

Stones along the roadside or lying in a ploughed field; they are really humble objects that often go unnoticed. During an art residency in Noyers, Burgundy, however, I found stones beginning to speak insistently to me.  I found it surprising and entrancing. My first discovery was that many of the stones held tiny fossilised shells of many kinds. I was fascinated, as the stones were really heavy, very different from the limestone rocks lying everywhere, rocks which split amazingly flat and thin. Then I began to find limestone thin slabs with the most beautiful patterns on one face, patterns of minute granulations in golds and browns.

Gold silverpoint on black

My stone collection got heavier and heavier! I retreated to my wonderful studio perch at La Porte Peinte in Noyers, and entered the complex world of these stones as I started to explore them by drawing them in metalpoint.

To my astonishment, their tiny world bewitched me so much that I found myself drawing almost at their command, creating work that was different, almost automatic in what I  found myself  drawing as I wove the details together.  I kept seeing different details that transformed themselves into other images as I studied them, revealing a whole world of personages, mythical animals, landscapes, a panoply of the imagination's possibilities.

Stone Lace II, silverpoint and Prismacolor, Jeannine Cook

The next discovery and delight was learning of the minute fossilised oyster shells that help form the famous "terroir", the hallmark of a wine - in this case, the terroir that makes Chablis such a famed and wonderful white wine experience. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow samples of these heavy conglomerations of fossils from a wonderful wine grower, Vincent Dauvissat,  in Chablis. His stones held me in their thrall for days, as they told of ancient seas teeming with life over 180 million yers ago where now there are rolling fertile hills and valleys, home to the Chablis vineyards.

Huitres de Chablis I, silverpoint, Prismacolor, Jeannine Cook

I spent days in company with these quiet but eloquent stones, utterly involved in creating metalpoint drawings from their configurations. The wonderful artist residency inevitably finished and so I rushed to the Post Office with a very heavy parcel – to send home, of course, more of the stones!

Here's to continuing my metalpoint conversations with these humble stones that lie along the roadsides of Burgundy. I can't wait to get back to them!

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.

Environments that Help Artists

Every artist instinctively seeks an environment that helps them create their art.

It is not always so easy to find either the place, nor the time and serenity to create, however. Every artist knows those stumbling blocks. Sometimes they are easily surmounted, other times it is not so easy.

Sometimes, luck intervenes too. In my case, Lady Luck definitely came calling this summer.

For a multitude of reasons, it has become difficult to have the time to spend in my studio, so I have been fortunate enough to be able to slip away for a while to different art residencies that I have been awarded hither and yon. This year, I had a magical two weeks in spring in Portugal.I was then able to have time at another residency, La Porte Peinte, in Burgundy, France, a country I adore anyway.

It is of course always a bit of a gamble going to art residencies.

It may be a wonderful place, with good studio facilities, but the area may not sing or the people who run the residency may not be terribly compatible – there are so many variables.

Until you get to the place, it is difficult to judge accurately whether you will be able to be truly creative there.

Even recommendations from other artists are not always an accurate gauge for one’s own needs.

La Porte Peinte, in Noyers sur Serein, in north-east Burgundy, near Auxerre, proves to be the most wonderful place in which to create art.

I have just spent the first half of a month’s residency there, and it was the most supportive, comfortable and welcoming place I could have dreamt of.

For a start, the medieval village is a delight.

You enter from the south over the Serein river.

At the entrance to Noyers sur Serein, photo J. Cook. 

And these are views from my eyrie perch window in my room.

Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, Noyers, photo J. Cook

Up the street from La Porte Peinte, photo J. Cook

L'Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall), Noyers, photo J. Cook

Michelle Anderson, the Executive Director of La Porte Peinte, is not only the most gracious of people, but her very international approach and wide knowledge of people and places make her able to help in so many ways. She also knows a lot of local people and that means that an artist has suddenly all sorts of insights and introductions into other ways of life in the area. That is beyond price. Her husband, Oreste, runs their elegant and diverse Gallery and does a million other things to make life at La Porte Peinte so pleasant and constructive. And yes, La Porte Peinte is situated in rue de la Porte Peinte - how about that for destiny!

The more I spend time at art residencies both in the United States and Europe, the more I realise that the atmosphere created by the people in charge is critical to an artist’s ability to create, explore new horizons and grow as an artist.

There is a subtle difference between being left to one’s own devices, to work in peace, and being left to be independent but at the same time, being offered the opportunity to involve oneself in the local cultural world, to meet other artists of all descriptions and disciplines and to be psychologically supported as an artist.