The Shock of Recognition

You enter an exhibition, perhaps almost by chance. You see the title of the show, and you are trying to orient yourself as to what it is about.

Then you round the first corner in the exhibit room, and boom, you get a jolt. Straight in front of you, out of the blue, you see a piece of art that you know well, something that has resonated with you before. And there it is again, quietly hanging on the wall. This shock of recognition, a thrill of interest and delight, are what makes me realise how much art means to me in daily life.

This reunion with pieces of art that I admire happened a little while ago when I strayed into the lovely CaixaForum exhibition hall in Palma, in the elegantly restored modernist Gran Hotel. I saw that there was an exhibition of etchings entitled, "From Dürer to Morandi. Engravings from the William Cuendet Foundation and the Atelier Saint-Pret". It was a large Swiss collection of very fine editions of work by innumerable artists from Dürer to Rembrandt, Canneletto, Piranesi, Goya, Degas and many others.

One of my first delights was a Rembrandt work - The Holy Family with a Cat, from 1654 - a work that always enchanted me with the inclusion of the cat. I had not seen it for a while, and so lingered to savour of the composition, the feeling conveyed by the whole harmonious order of the etching.

The Holy Family with a Cat, etching, 1654 .Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (image courtesy of the Jenisch Museum, Vevey, Switzerland).

Another happy reunion amongst the other one hundred and thirty works was this deliciously memorable work by Edgar Degas, At the Louvre, Painting, Mary Cassatt, 1879-1880. I have always loved its daring composition and essentially late 19th century French atmosphere. Both these images are courtesy of the Jenisch Museum, Vevey, Switzerland.

At the Louvre, Painting, Mary Cassatt, etching, 1879-1880., Edgar Degas (image  courtesy of the Jenisch Museum, Vevey, Switzerland).

My impulsive choice to walk into this exhibition, as I hastened through a list of errands, was such a bonus. The shock of recognition jolted me again and again. I came out exhilarated and grateful for the serendipitious gifts of art.

From Reading about Art to a Metalpoint Show

Threading my way between matters of health, matters of daily life and delights ranging from markets that are a visual and sensual feast of fresh produce to turquoise-sapphire seas sparkling enticingly, I keep trying to remember I am supposed to be an artist!

A reminder of this came this week with the opening of "Luminous Metal: Contemporary Drawings in Metalpoint" at the Clement Art Gallery in Troy, New York. Despite Hurricane Irene being in evidence in the area, apparently there was a goodly number of people at the reception. Photos of the show can be seen on Facebook. I was one of ten artists invited to exhibit in this show, something I was delighted about. We each had to submit three pieces for the show, and judging by the photos and sneak preview, we are all as diverse as possible, which of course makes for a fascinating exhibition when it comes to savouring of the wide range of possibilities even within this relatively narrow medium of silverpoint/metalpoint.

Meanwhile, threading though my daily life, I keep dipping into a truly interesting book which I found recently. Entitled "Artists' Techniques and Materials", it was written by Antonella Fuga, translated into English by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia, and published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2006. One of the simple reasons I looked at it originally in the Royal Academy bookshop in London was that it was one of the few books dealing with artistic techniques and media which talked of silverpoint. (I found some seemingly definitive and weightly tomes on drawing there, which did not even mention the words "silverpoint" or "metalpoint" - shame on the authors, for they did not do their homework.)

I soon realised, however, that the book I did buy by Ms. Fuga is a gem. It is teaching me, in succinct and clear fashion, with wonderful, annotated illustrations, about media in a way that has me enthralled. Not only are drawing media talked of, but all manner of other media - printmaking, painting, sculpture, mosaic and intarsia, ceramics, glass, metalwork and jewellry, as well as contemporary techniques. Within each discipline, there are a myriad techniques explained, many of which are new to me – filigree glass, reticello work in glass, scagliola intarsia, for instance. There is a page of text for each, so that you learn enough about each technique to be at least sensible about it - and it is a door opened to further exploration if you want. Such fun!

It certainly keeps reminding me of the privilege of belonging to this great band of incredibly diverse artists, one that has existed since time immemorial in such intensity, imagination and skill.

"No duality, everything is nature"

There is a wide-ranging and fascinating exhibition currently on show at Savannah's Telfair Museums, at the Jepson Center, entitled Modern Masters. American Abstraction at Midcentury". With works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the explosive diversity of art made during the mid-20th century in America is celebrated with forty-three key paintings and sculptures. The exhibition is travelling the country for four years, and it will remain on display at the Jepson until February 6th, 2011.

It is a show worth visiting several times, because of its diversity and density. Not only are there canvases by stellar artists to contemplate and appreciate, but there are some fascinating sculptures that I found most arresting.

One of them, "Banquet", shown courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, stopped me in my tracks with its multi-layered knobbly forms and metal alloys that evoke stalagmites or primitive corals. It is by an artist with whom I was unfamiliar, Ibram Lassaw (1913-2003).

Ibram Lassaw, Banquet, 1961, bronze, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Ibram Lassaw, Banquet, 1961, bronze, Smithsonian American Art Museum,

(As an aside, I find that being a permanent newcomer to every place I have lived in Europe and North America since I had to leave my home in East Africa, I am constantly having to "catch up" on art, law, history, society in general – It is a humbling but exhilarating situation!)

But back to Ibram Lassaw. He too was an immigrant, from Egypt, working in New York as an artist from the 1920s; he became an active participant in the avant-garde art world and was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. He learned to weld while serving in the US Army during World War II, and continued experimenting with ideas and materials for the next two decades. He fused his ideas on art-making with concepts derived from extensive and catholic reading to reach a philosophy about the holistic nature of the universe and all that is contained therein. He suddenly had an artistic breakthrough in the 1950s, and began to create complex structures that evoked nature in many forms, cosmic and microcosmic.

He said that everything is nature, "every atom that makes me up is nature". He wrote, "I am constantly absorbed by things that are going on around me, the motion of people in the streets, the movement of clouds, the patterns of branches. There is no duality, everything is nature."

It was obvious from the work, "Banquet" that he was fusing ideas about many aspects of life and nature in this work, to achieve a delicate complex work that rewards with careful inspection and contemplation. What I found so interesting, however, was one of those delicious coincidences that occurs: soon afterwards, I saw a re-broadcast on PBS of Hunting the Hidden Dimension. The Most Famous Fractal about the late Benoit Mandelbrot's wonderful mathematical way of describing the "roughness" he saw all around him in nature. Before Mandelbrot, artists had indeed seen the "self-similarity" and "roughness" in nature, but mathematicians had considered these jagged, self-repeating shapes unmeasurable. Mandelbrot introduced fractals, the concept of another dimension, a fractal dimension, that lay between two and three dimensions. This dimension allows for mathematical measurements and thus, amongst other things, a deeper understanding of self-similarity - the endless repetition of stalks of broccoli, trunks to branches to twigs on a tree and its leaves.

As an example, the image below is that of a high voltage dielectric breakdown within a block of plexiglass - it creates a beautiful fractal pattern called a Lichtenberg figure. The branching discharges ultimately become hair-like but are thought to extend down to the molecular level. (Bert Hickman. http://www.teslamania.com/)

12" block - Captured Lightning scupture (Image courtesy of Theodore Gray)

Lassaw's "Banquet", created in 1961, was in many ways an early evocation of the same wonderful complexity that nature offers, everywhere, all the time.

These happy coincidences are what I love about seeing an art exhibition. There is always some work of art that makes one more aware, more able to make connections and add new, rich dimensions to life. What fun!

A Sense of the Marvellous

I saw a large and diverse exhibition of black and white photographs of Paris, Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography and Paris, at Savannah's Telfair Museum. In the introductory explanation about all these photos which mostly date from the 1920s and 1930s, there was the phrase, "a sense of the marvellous". It struck me, because it is so important to retain that sense, especially if one wants to be an artist.

The exhibition did indeed illustrate some wonderful moments. Serendipitous sights - the wonderful reflection of buildings in a puddle by the pavement's edges by Ilse Bing, for instance, or extraordinary patterns of shadows and people beneath the Eiffel Tower by Andre Kertesz - were accompanied by more planned photographs of the illuminated Eiffel Tower. or old street scenes in Paris. There were many photographs which were much more "contrived", in keeping with the prevailing surrealism movement. But it was the photographs that record the photographer's eye and awareness of magic and marvels that I savoured most.

Ilse Bing, 'Three men on steps by the Seine' , (Image courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Ilse Bing, Rue de Valois, Paris, 1932, gelatin-silver print, (Image courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

Perhaps I am greatly influenced by all the childhood hours I spent with my photographer grandfather, Frank Anderson, as he photographed herds of giraffe or other wild animals on our farm in Tanzania. With an important body of work to his credit, as he documented the disappearing tribes and the East African wild life, Frank had a keenly developed sense of the marvellous. He taught me that observation and awareness, as well as quick reactions in capturing a photograph, are key. Key to art-making, but key, too, to a deep enjoyment and appreciation of life. It was an invaluable preparation for my later life as an artist.

Children in central Tanganyika, 1929-30, sepia print, Frank Anderson photographer (copyright Jeannine Cook)

Glorious Metalpoint Drawings

I had a wonderful treat today, to which I had been looking forward. After spending the morning doing life drawing, I went to the Telfair Museum (Savannah, GA) to see the current exhibition, Metalpoint Drawings by Dennis Martin.

I have known about Dennis Martin's extraordinary talent for many years, and his work was included in The Luster of Silver, the survey of contemporary silverpoint drawings that I was involved with at the Telfair in 2006. Now his widow, Denise, has donated a magnificent goldpoint drawing to the Telfair's permanent collection and this exhibition is from her collection of her late husband's work. (He died in 2001 at a very young age.)

The drawings ranged from the huge donated piece, "Girl Laying", 42 x 60 inches in size, to the tiny and intimate, studies of portions of the human anatomy that become abstracts, despite their realism. Most combine gold and palladium (and often deep, intense graphite for backgrounds), but some are goldpoints or, most unusually, palladiumpoint. (Since the generic term, metalpoint, describes the method of drawing/mark-making with a metal stylus, the use of the terms, silverpoint, goldpoint, copperpoint or palladiumpoint, for instance, simply describes the metal used to draw.)

Deanna XXVI. silverpoint, Dennis Martin

Metalpoint, Dennis Martin

A remarkable artist, and a memorable exhibition not to be missed!

Sharing a Love of Drawing

One of my private delights in life is constantly finding links and a serendipitous "circularity" in life. I have just had a delicious example of such a coincidence.

When I was flying back from Spain this week, I used the trip as time to catch up on reading various magazines. In a number of the Spectator magazine, I noticed an advertisement for a guided tour by Curator Hugo Chapman for Spectator readers of an exhibit at the British Museum. The exhibition is entitled "Fra Angelico to Leonardo. Italian Renaissance Drawing" and features about one hundred master drawings from the British Museum collection and that of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I kept the magazine page to check out the British Museum website when I got home.

Today, I open up my e-mail for the first time, and what should I find but a delightful message from my friend and blog-follower in the United Kingdom, Marion Brown, alerting me to the same exhibition and its marvels. A wonderful coincidence. One that also makes me wish I could hop over to London to see it before the exhibition closes on 25th July.

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the Infant Christ and a cat, c. 1478-81.  Photo: TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Even browsing the BM website makes me realise that the drawing medium I love so much, silverpoint, is key to such an exhibition. The changing attitude to drawings, the role they began to play in artists' working methods and the intimate links back to classical time in Greece and Rome are apparently demonstrated by Hugo Chapman's choice of works to display. The characteristics of paper, too, are brought out in Dr. Chapman's blog, in that the drawings, when they arrived from Florence, needed to "rest" and acclimatise to their new environment. Since paper is a living organism, it adapts and changes when it is moved. Any artist who works on paper finds this out, almost the hard way, when a finished work suddenly develops undulations, for instance, even under glazing. Given time, the work will adapt to the new conditions and revert to its normal appearance.

Thank you, Marion, for telling me about this exhibition. It is interesting to watch how many more museums are mounting master drawing exhibitions, many of which are featuring silverpoint more prominently. The power exercised by drawings is eloquent. The directness and honesty of this medium - or media, given that there are pen and inks, metalpoints, chalks and later graphites - allow today's museum visitors almost to feel as if the artist is working in front of them, trying out ideas, peering closely at the human body, altering and correcting things. The span of centuries means nothing as one looks at a drawing; its voice is singular and commanding, eloquent of the artist's vision.

If you are lucky enough to be in London, I suspect this exhibition will be well worth a visit. Failing that, the catalogue, Fra Angelico to Leonardo. Italian Renaissance Drawings", would be a lovely possession, I know. Now to order it.

I wasn't the only one thinking of Henri Rousseau

Little did I realise that there would be a major exhibition opening on Henri le Douanier Rousseau when I wrote about him on 3rd February on this blog. Let me add the information.

The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, has just opened an exhibition on Rousseau, as I learned from ArtDaily.org. Small portraits, landscapes of suburbs and the French countryside, as well as larger works of his jungle themes are apparently complemented by photographs, one of Rousseau's great interests. Examining Rousseau's role as a pioneer of modernism was the major thrust of curators Philippe Buttner, Curator of the Fondation Beyeler, and Christopher Green, Professor Emeritus for Art History at the Courteauld Institute, London.

Tiger in a Tropical Storm, (Surprised!), Henri Douanier Rousseau 1891

I quote from the ArtDaily.org article: "Rousseau introduced a new approach to imaginative vision into painting. His perception of reality was based primarily on observation, imitation and transformation of the visible. In this way he taught modern artists how things known could be constructed using the building blocks of the known. He established a new logic and mechanics of compositional structure that profoundly affected subsequent artists, all the way down to the Surrealists."

The Dream, Henri Douanier Rousseau, 1910 (Image courtesy of MOMA)

Louis Agassiz Fuertes

Many years ago, when we first moved to coastal Georgia, I had the delight of seeing an exhibition at Savannah's Telfair Museum of Art about Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Not being born in this country, I am always catching up on matters American, and this wonderful naturalist-artist was one such discovery.

I was reminded of his paintings and quick, skillful pencil drawings when I read of an exhibition which has just opened at the New York State Museum. Born in 1874, Louis Agassiz Fuertes was soon recognised as a very skillful artist, and his short life (he was killed in a car accident in 1927) was devoted to recording birds through North America. Cornell University, his alma mater, has a wonderful collection of his work.

Belted Kingfisher Megaceryle Alcyon by Louis Agassiz Fuertes

This leading bird artist of his day was a dedicated artist who tramped through woods and vales to record birds in the wild, as well as using specimens back in the studio for his detailed paintings. He knew how to capture the essential character of each bird. His knowledge of habitat for each bird species was also superb. His work made him one of the important pioneers, following in Audubon's footsteps, for environmental awareness. We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude as his work made people aware of the need to protect birds and their habitat.

A pair of passenger pigeons (accompanied by a second work _, (Image courtesy of Askart.com)

Look out for Louis Agassiz Fuertes' paintings and drawings - they are a huge delight.

Dutch Utopia tour at Telfair Museum

Today's visit to the Telfair Museum's exhibition, Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914, was a fascinating delight for a huge group of art lovers from Savannah and beyond. Curator Holly McCullough led everyone through the genesis, choices, history and social background of an exhibition she had worked on for long years.

Holland became a magnet for many American artists, men and women, who chose to work, sometimes in colonies, in many small towns throughout the country. They created paintings that reflected Holland's silvery light, seascapes and dunes. Other work depicted Dutch society, selectively and with an emphasis on older, traditional mores. People were portrayed as sober, hardworking, church-going, mostly garbed in costumes that were chosen more for their pictorial value than any accuracy of local costume. Gari Melchers, one of the main artists represented in the exhibition, with dramatic paintings large and small, had close ties to the Telfair as he was Fine Arts Advisor to the Museum early in the 20th century. His choice of art to be acquired, during his tenure at the Museum, led to holdings of these American artists working in Holland, such as Walter MacEwen and George Hitchcock. Other artists represented in the exhibition range from Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman and John Singer Sargent to women like Elizabeth Nourse and Anna Stanley. They all spent time in one or more of the small towns and villages favoured by the artists for their timeless beauties.

Self Portrait, Elizabeth Nourse , 1892

Venice, watercolor over traces of pencil, 1891. Elizabeth Nourse, (Image courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum) 

Girl carrying Sheaves (Harvest - Holland), c. 1895, Anna Henry, Private collection

The 17th century influences show in much of the art, from Franz Hals to Rembrandt or Vermeer, and the silvery light is a hallmark of many of the paintings. I delighted in some of the depictures of the leaded glass windows, always with spindly pot plants reaching for the light but managing to add touches of background colour to interior scenes. Other aspects of the paintings dwell on the essence of Holland - windmills, tulips, orderly streets and fishing boat scenes. It was thus not surprising that a number of these paintings had been in European public and private collections from the time they were produced, although many others had been purchased by the new collecting public in this country. The Telfair had assembled this show from public and private collections and many had not been exhibited in public for long years.

If you miss this exhibition in Savannah, you can catch it at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and finally at the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands. Thanks to Holly McCullough and her team, this exhibition is an unusual, fascinating and often very lovely exhibition well worth visiting.

My Art-Tasting open studio - December 5th

Well, the house is turned upside down and has become an airy, spacious studio in which my artwork is out on display. The windows are clean, the floors scrubbed, the flood lights placed outside to turn the oak trees into wondrous night-time cathedrals. The guest list is filling fast and the caterers primed. All these are the rituals of preparing for my Art-Tasting, the fifteenth year I am doing this open studio and wine-tasting, now a tradition for many faithful friends and collectors.

I am sure that every artist experiences the same moments of surprise, sometimes irritation, and general feeling of being able more dispassionately to assess the art hung at an exhibition. I find it an interesting experience every time my art is exhibited, for of course, each piece has a different conversation, depending in part on its neighbours and the general context. Displaying watercolours, silverpoint and graphite drawings together seems to work, thank goodness, and they are definitely the ying and yang of each other. However, a unity in matting and framing help pull everything together. The art of displaying is just as much a skill as the creation of any artwork - and one can constantly learn about placement, context, lighting, labelling.

Now to hope that the weather gods will be kind for tomorrow - Cedar Point is always more beautiful in the soft December afternoon sunlight. Greeting guests and friends is a delight, however, no matter what the weather.

The Marshes at Cedar Point, Georgia