Burgundy Drawings

Ammonites de Bourgogne, silverpoint, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

Poster for talk and exhibition at Noyers Museum

It is done – I have managed to produce 15 drawings for the exhibition at the Musée de Noyers! What a relief! I deliver them next Monday and the exhibition will run concurrently with the show I have hanging at the gallery at La Porte Peinte.

Preparing for an exhibition under deadlines is never a favourite occupation for any artist. However, some people do work best like that. I am not sure that I do – the results of the effort will be for others to judge!

What has been both interesting but also more complex has been the need to weave together a body of work that pertains to the ideas I put forward originally, namely the birth of metalpoint drawing in the scriptora of monasteries, where monks used lead to delineate the illuminations and trace lines for the script of their illuminated manuscripts. Combined with that history, I wanted to celebrate the tiny fossilized oyster shells found in the Kimmelridgian layers of soil found especially in the Chablis area and which contribute to the special terroir of those wines. I had picked up samples of these heavy stones when I first arrived in Burgundy last year, and they have led me on a fascinating odyssey.

Burgundia I, silverpoint, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

Tying the metalpoint’s history together with the fossil-laden stones was thanks to those industrious monks who in medieval times also helped to spread the cultivation of wine, as they founded the great monasteries in Burgundy. Vezelay, Fontenay, Pontigny: they are all centers of such a rich heritage.

Vigne de Chablis, silverpoint, 24 carat gold foil, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

Even the wonderful and mighty plane trees, such as one sees at Fontenay that was planted in 1780 by the Cistercian monks, ten years before they had to leave their monastery, was part of that long-standing monastic heritage that enriches us all.

Plane Tree Bark, silverpoint, copperpoint, sterling silver foil, watercolour, Jeannine Cook

The other aspect that I tried to incorporate into these drawings is the close links between Burgundy and ocre, one of the key pigments in man’s artistic endeavours since the earliest marks man-made on cave walls from Australia to Africa to Europe. Burgundy was famous for its yellow ocre deposits and only ceased to produce ocre pigments in the 20th century. By heating yellow ocre, red ocre is produced; the two pigments find their way into every drawing and painting imaginable down the ages. I used the two colours as tinted grounds for some of the drawings I did for this project. Since early times, some artists used tinted grounds for their metalpoint drawings, so again, I was following a long-standing tradition.

Shell Silhouettes, silverpoint, watercolour on yellow ocre-tinted ground, Jeannine Cook

Oyster Dance, silverpoint, watercolour on red ocre-tinted ground, Jeannine Cook

From the Vine, silverpoint, 24 carat gold foil, yellow ocre-tinted ground, Jeannine Cook

I loved finding out all sorts of things about history and aspects of beautiful Burgundy for this project. It has been such fun - the drawings have been the perfect vehicle and excuse for all sorts of new insights and investigations. It is marvellous when art and fresh knowledge can go hand in hand.

Art as the "Open Sesame" to Experiences

Every time I get involved in art, I learn something new. It is usually something totally unexpected, frequently something delicious.

The most recent insight I have gained through my art - a very minor item but a delight to me - is about the diminutive, secretive but oh-so-melodious warblers who spend a season in my garden. There is a lot of asparagus fern which periodically dies off, so I have been pruning back the dead tendrils and leaves in the interests of "a tidy garden". During the late autumn storms last year, an exquisite small nest blew out of the trees above the ferns. I saved it and am now trying to draw it in silverpoint (still an on-going complexity!). What should I find as the major ingredient, woven in with such skill and elegance, but the dead asparagus fern leaves. So I now learn that my small feathered friends would really appreciate it if I left them all the leaves when they die. That would make their nest-building much more straight-forward! Without art, I would have never known this.

My thanks to Sergey Yeliseev and Frank Vassen for the use of these images of one of the warblers, the  Blackcap, which I know frequent our garden and gives us wonderful songs.

As I was drawing this nest, I remembered a quote I had noted from Eric R. Kandel's book,  The Age of Insight, to which I have alluded in previous blog posts.  He wrote that through art, we can embrace all sorts of aspects of life, from beauty to  violence and ugliness.  "Art enriches our lives by exposing us to ideas, feelings and situations that we might never have experienced, or even want to experience, otherwise.  Art gives us the chance to explore and try out in our imagination a variety of different experiences and emotions."

I am not sure Kandel would have expected the type of example I have just given, but...!  Nonetheless, I was allowed another type of fascination and experience yesterday at an art history class, when the professor examined the restoration and meaning of Peter Bruegel the Elder's The Wine of St Martin's Day, recently acquired by the Prado Museum in Madrid after being shown to them in 2010.  For a start, I was unfamiliar with the medium combination of glue-sized tempera on linen, which was apparently a cheaper way of providing a large painting to a buyer, rather than using a wooden board (more widespread in  the North than the canvas used in Italy for a painting surface).

The Wine of St Martin's Day, c. 1565-1568, Peter Bruegel the Elder.  Image courtesy of the Prado Museum, Madrid

Without exposure to this painting in detail, I would not probably have ever imagined what it was like to participate in the sampling of new wine on 11th November, the  feast day of St. Martin, with such a crowd, people from all walks of life.  It took me on quite a stretch of imagination!