Gifts of the Moment

Today was one of those gifts that nature bestows on one a few times each summer along the coast, when the humidity drops, the skies are clear and a gentle breeze makes the world joyously sparkling. It was the perfect day to be out drawing along the marshes, a welcome respite from other activities and concerns. The additional incentive was that it was a day designated for drawing by being part of the international Sketchcrawl group.

It was a day to experiment too, with a slightly different format of graphite drawing, with prepared grounds in different subtle colours. I had seen artist George Sorrels' wonderful Arches drawing book in which he had prepared varying sizes of small squares and rectangles in subtle colour, page by pages. Then, according to the subject matter he found, he would select a prepared area and do a graphite drawing of exquisite beauty and sensitivity. So I prepared paper in a number of colours, and sallied forth.

It was enormous fun to be drawing and experimenting, but more than the fun, there were so many gifts of the moment. The salt water marshes, emerald scintillating to golden, were generous with their ever-changing light. The tide flowed full and then softly ebbed, transforming the whole landscape, with the water surface rippled in a million patterns of light from the on-shore breeze. Osprey keened and sailed above. Herons stalked and drowsed, wood storks dangled their long legs just above the spartina grass as they flapped along to the next hunting ground and gulls dipped into the water and swirled back around to dip again. Marsh wrens chattered endlessly from their hidden perches. Schools of fish made their distinctive whoosh of water parting as they leapt in unison to escape a hidden peril. Time lost any meaning.

I don't know if these gifts of beauty, music and peace show up in the art I did in any way, but as artist Phyllis Purvis-Smith remarked in a March 2009 article in American Artist, "experiencing nature for the artist is also important". I know that after the time spent drawing, I felt utterly restored by the generosity of the day.

Sunlight and Shadows

Today is a day of heavy flat light, laden with humidity and heat, here on the Georgia coast. All contours are softened, distances are blurred and somehow the scene is flat and almost featureless. It is a day that makes me long for the bright sharp sunlight of the Mediterranean. It also makes me realise how much landscape artists are influenced by the ambient light.

Think, for instance, of Japanese artists. Down the ages, in their nature-based art, the Japanese have been very aware of the play of light on rocks, trees, architecture. Shadows, the corollary of sunlight, are a natural function of their architecture, for example, with the broad eaves on buildings casting wonderful angled shadows. The ultimate interpretation of the beauty of light can be seen in their black lacquer ware, flecked with gold or silver. Viewed by lantern or candlelight, this lacquer ware evokes their northern, sea-influenced light in haunting fashion.

At the other extreme are Western artists who work in the brilliance of Mediterranean light. Take, for example, two of Spain's artists, Joaquin Sorolla from Valencia and Joaquin Mir from Barcelona. Sorolla was multi-faceted in his art, ranging from wonderful luminous portraits to vast historical paintings and, my favourites, landscapes flooded with light. In fact, a quote by Edmund Peel from James Gibbons Huneker, in the book, The Painter, Joaquin Sorolla, says it all: "Sorolla – the painter of vibrating sunshine without equal". It is interesting to study Sorolla's paintings: many of his landscapes which include figures have dramatically bold, abstract shadows (such as his paintings of Valencian fisher women). Yet landscapes done in Javea, Valencia or Malaga, in mainland Spain's Mediterranean coast, are often painted in a very narrow range of values, without dramatic shadows. Even more deliriously high key are some of his depictions of the almost incandescent cliffs and headlands in Mallorca, especially the sun-drenched scenes of Cala San Vicente in the north-east of the island.

"El mar en Mallorca" , Joaquin Sorolla

Interestingly, Mallorca, with its amazing light, was also the springboard for Joaquin Mir's greatest successes. A contemporary of Sorolla (who lived from 1863-1923), Mir was born in Barcelona in 1873 and lived until 1940. Colour and light were the keys to his art : "All I want is for my works to lighten the heart and flood the eyes and the soul with light", he said in 1928. He forged his own path to celebrating the Mediterranean sunlight and shadows, sometimes veering to realism, other times towards abstraction, but always seeking to interpret the beauty he saw in a delirium of colour and light. He borrowed the Impressionists' palette of colours, eschewing black, but he used the colours in his own highly original fashion. When you see Mir's works done in Mallorca, you can feel the wonderfully clear light pulsating over everything - the Es Baluard Museum has a number of these canvases (http://www.esbaluard.org).

Joaquim Mir i Trinxet (or Joaquin Mir, 1873-1940): Canyelles

Perhaps evoking the clarity of Mediterranean light will help banish the Georgian grey skies of humid heat – I can but hope!

"Seizing Nature as she is"

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes was a French painter who lived from 1750 to 1819. He was an early advocate of painting directly from nature in order to produce landscapes. While in Rome from 1778 to 1782, he used to make landscape studies at different times of the day to catch the changes in light. As a result of this practice, one of the pieces of advice he developed for fellow painters was, "Work in haste, so as to seize nature as she is".

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes - View of the Convent of Ara Coeli with Pines , 1780s, (Image courtesy of the Louvre)

I remembered this piece of advice with wry amusement as I sat painting in a beautiful Spanish garden, these past weeks, and struggled to keep pace with the changing light and the periodicity of flowers as they opened and closed at different times of the day. Working in the brilliant Mediterranean light of early summer is a delight, but humbling in that every hour makes a huge difference in the appearance of subject matter. Shadows on white walls that are entrancing at nine in the morning are long gone at ten o'clock. Fragrant, subtly-coloured nicotiana flowers (tobacco flowers) that are wide open at seven a.m. shut firmly a couple of hours later and do not open again until early evening. Their timing is closely linked to their attraction to moths who pollinate them enthusiastically in the nighttime hours. But painting under those conditions is another matter!

No wonder Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes was advocating speed and catching the most distinctive traits of that particular landscape when he was painting plein air in the Rome area. He, and every plein air artist since then has learned that nature is a severe task mistress when it come to painting outdoors.

Perfumes, sound and light

I have just spent time in my other home in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. There, it is a green and beautiful spring after bountiful rains this year, and the island is celebrating with exuberant growth on mountain slopes and down stony valleys.

I had some time to paint and draw, and once again, my sense of place was expanded and extended. I know that wherever one is working outdoors as an artist, you become conscious of all your surroundings. It seemed to be especially the case this spring in Spain: the perfume of orange blossom, lemon blossom, jasmine and roses floated everywhere on the air.

Citrus sinensis Osbeck painting by Mary E. Eaton from a 1917 issue of National Geographic

As the sun warmed, each morning, and the sky became brilliant, the perfumes intensified and became intoxicating. The light grew more brilliant - oh, that Mediterranean light! And as I sat quietly, totally enraptured with all this light and drunk on these exquisite perfumes, I was serenaded by blackbirds singing their wondrous melodies, or tiny serins buzzing excitedly high in the trees above.

I was soothed and inspired. As the light changed and the flowers I was depicting opened, moved and faded, I was enveloped in this world in which I was sitting. I felt a bond and a sense of kinship with all the wonderful artists who have worked in the Mediterranean region down the ages - Italian masters like Botticelli or Guercino, Corot, Monet, Renoir, Matisse, Cezanne or Raoul Dufy in France, even Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, just to name one Spanish artist who celebrated so superbly the brilliant light of Spain (go to this site if you speak Spanish or this one for English). They all responded to the same light, perfumes and sounds. From the flowers painted on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs to the frescoes on walls of opulent homes in Pompeii, artists have always gloried in the beauties of flowers growing in the Mediterranean world. I felt it was a great privilege to be immersed in this world of brilliant light, intoxicating perfume and liquid bird song, as I celebrated Mallorca's spring flowers in silverpoint and watercolour.

Landscapes and a Sense of Place

I have been preparing for a solo exhibition I shall be having at the Southeast Georgia Health System in coastal Georgia in June, and chose the title of the show to be A Sense of Place. As I selected art to exhibit, it made me think again about how landscapes feed into an artist's sense of belonging somewhere.

Clearly, the better you know a place, the more you can enter into its inner workings. So you are better able to capture what that landscape means to you. The viewer can thus participate in and share more deeply in your experience. By grappling with the landscape as you get to know it, you allow yourself, and ultimately the viewer, to move beyond the merely representational. Your experience and knowledge become a passport for the viewer to understand and more deeply appreciate that place. Distilling one's own sense of place is an ever-ongoing activity because each landscape, natural or man made is continuously changing, developing, evolving. In many ways, this is good, because it means that an artist can return again and again to the same subject matter and learn more, thus portraying it differently each time in the art created.

Soaring over Creighton, watervolour, Jeannine Cook artist

Cezanne is a wonderful example of an artist who returned again and again to the same places to paint landscapes (think of his beloved Mont Sainte Victoire or the Jas deBouffan estate). He analysed a landscape, learned about the way the light moved and shaped things, organised his perceptions of form and colour. The resultant painting, in watercolour or oils, thus presents the viewer with, of course, the fundamental forms of the landscape, but beneath that veil of appearances, Cezanne captures the inner essence of that place, its soul. That is why his landscapes become so memorable, so powerful, so passionate and, at the same time, often, so intellectual and radical in their break with his contemporaries' approaches to art.

Mont Sainte Victoire, oil on canvas, 1904, Paul Cezanne (Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum)

The longer I live in coastal Georgia, the more subtle and beautiful the landscapes seem to me. It thus becomes an endless challenge to understand and simplify their essence, so that I might share their unique beauty and importance with others.

"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

“Nature, however beautiful, is not art.”

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The Coming of Night at Keckliko, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, 1920s

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In Martha R. Severens’ book on Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, An Artist, a Place and a Time, (http://www.gibbesmuseum.org/) she quotes Birge Harrison saying that “Nature, however beautiful, is not art. Art is natural beauty interpreted through human temperament”. This was a tenet Alice Ravenel Huger Smith kept very much in mind when she was painting her luminous watercolors of the Low Country around Charleston.

It is an observation that constantly resonates with me as I try to interpret the landscapes of coastal Georgia or places I visit in Europe. What to select first, when one is choosing a scene? How to portray the subject one has chosen? What medium is best? Why is one attracted to that scene chosen – what makes it so special that one wants to spend time and energy depicting it?

Working plein air is a wonderful exercise in humility. The light changes, the insects bite, one loses the initial spark of excitement, the wind blows – so many challenges! But if one keeps on going and tries to remember why that scene called out to be drawn or painted, somehow one struggles on through to some form of conclusion. Later, the studio is the place for consideration and evaluation of what one has tried to accomplish. Watercolor and silverpoint drawings are both unforgiving so it is hard to make many changes. Nonetheless, sometimes, the natural beauty does get interpreted in successful fashion and the landscape painting or drawing works out. That leaves me with a good feeling and makes me all the more eager to go out looking for the next installment of “beautiful nature”.

Clouds by Constable, trees by Cezanne, comments by Jeannine Cook

March 1st, and the clouds sailing by remind me of Constable’s wonderful cloud studies. It is amazing how acutely he observed those cloud formations, especially when you think of the English climate, where winds so often move the clouds across the sky so speedily. No wonder meteorologists have used Constable’s cloud art to learn more of the 19th century climate in England! Here in coastal Georgia, cloud formations are perhaps less fleeting on many days, but today, with cold fronts moving in, the crisp clear light is like that of more northern climates.

“A Cloud Study," by the 19th-century painter John Constable. Credit Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

John Constable. Cloud Study. 1822 (Image courtesy of the Tate)

Beneath the sailing clouds, the bare winter trees dip and bend, making me think of Cezanne’s austere trees. Every artist is indeed influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by what Cezanne did – witness the current hugely important exhibition, Cezanne and Beyond, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions). The trees that Cezanne distilled to their essence are an example of what Liubov Popova (Russian, 1889-1924) talked about: “Cezanne no longer depicted the impression of the object, but only its essence.”

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Almond Trees in Provence (1900),

When I draw trees in silverpoint or paint them in watercolors, I try to find what makes their strength and rhythms so distinctive, and yet so universal. Live oaks or red cedars, for instance, are emblematic of coastal Georgia, as they endure heat and wind, sandy soils and scant natural nourishment. Their survival could teach us all a great deal about living in grace, even in adversity.