Island Art-making

Last weekend, bright and early, I set off by boat to a friend's island for a day of art with my artist friend,  Marjett Schille. As we stepped onto the dock and walked along the deliciously distinctive boardwalk to the high ground, it was like entering a magic kingdom. Islands always have a strange allure - it is as though time is somehow suspended, and the routines of daily life slip away. Everything becomes possible, fresh and beckoning. In other words, the most wonderful place imaginable to visit as an artist.

We spent a golden, sun-filled day in an incredibly ancient and sacred-feeling place, a vast Indian shell mound dating back thousands of years. All the bleached oysters have created the perfect soil environment for red cedars to grow, with live oaks a little further away from the salt water marsh line.

A Grasp on the Marshes, watercolour and sanguine ink, Jeannine Cook artist

These trees are huge, gnarled, contorted - each one is a total personality. One could spend years simply doing "portraits" of these trees, survivors of storms, droughts, gales and other adversities.

The Cedar Seer, silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

We worked hard - if you can call it work - as it is always such a privilege and joy to be able to visit this island. Time means nothing. The sun moves around, the tide comes swiftly back to lap at the roots of the cedars and the herons sit silently far above in the tree tops. Only the diminutive pigs, rooting in the dry leaves, make any sound.

The Marshes of McIntosh, graphite, Jeannine Cook artist, Private collection

Before we could comprehend, the sun was slanting far to the west and it was time to head back to the house to join our wonderful hosts. Soon, in the luminous twilight, we coasted gently home on a full tide to "the hill", the mainland, as the bright moon rose and Venus glowed far above our peaceful boat.

Island art-making is indeed a special affair.

Quick or Slow - which is best for Drawing?

The life drawing group in which I participate has a very sensible programme of one session of short poses, and then - normally - the following week, the same model poses for one long pose.

These sessions always get me thinking about the speed at which I draw and how fast or slowly other artists there draw. Some people can produce a very finished drawing in a remarkably short time, while others seem barely to have made many marks in the same time period.

Historically, drawing have always fallen into the categories of quick studies and finished drawings, but history seldom tells us how long each artist actually took to accomplish the drawing. Rembrandt, clearly, had a wonderful ability to draw fast and evocatively; his pen and ink drawings have a breathless immediacy on occasions, blots, drying pens, scribbles and everything in between. His drawing of Jesus and the Adulteress is spare and fast, as if he was thinking, planning, organising. Other drawings evoke a spur-of-the-moment view as he sees someone asleep or sitting in a moment of introspection, a moment that he wants to remember, a scene that he wants to record for the pure joy of drawing. Spare and elegant, his lines are fast and fluid.

Jesus and the Adulteress, Rembrandt

Granted, the medium somewhat dictates the speed at which an artist draws. Pen and ink, conte, graphite or charcoal are all relatively fast, and marks can be made expressively with quick results. When you get to silverpoint, things tend to slow down a lot. The time available to make a drawing is therefore important, and subject matter tends often to dictate the medium – if the scene is about to disappear, you chose a quicker, more impressionistic way of capturing it. Each artist also has an individual eye, choosing what is important to record. Some aim mainly to capture the essence of the subject; others get fascinated by the play of light, the spatial composition or other aspects which are more time-consuming to depict.

Adolph Menzel, for instance, often used a wonderful technique of drawing a person doing something from multiple poses on the same page.

Man scraping the  bottom of the pot, Adolph Menzel, 1815-1905 (Image courtesy of the BBC)

In a way, he was a forerunner to William Kentridge, with his many images being drawn, erased, filmed and then refilmed after changes. Menzel was drawing fast, fluently - he was a master draughtman. Kentridge is a superlative draughtsman too, but his approach, innovative and very much of our era with its mix of media, tends ultimately to be a slow and meticulous process, as each drawing evolves, is recorded and then evolves again until its final concluding version in narrative.  As Kentridge remarked,  “The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.”

Drawing for Project,  charcoal, William Kentridge (Image courtesy of Nitram Fine Art Charcoal)

Lots of approaches to drawing - mercifully! It means that each of us can be a tortoise or a hare in our drawing methods. The results are really what count.

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!

Artists and Gardens

Now that the weather has cooled a little and rain has revived the garden, it is time to start thinking of planning and planting the garden once more. Inspired by a recent wonderful Coastal Wildscapes symposium on planting native species to restore biodiversity in one's surroundings and gardens, I have been doing a lot of "mental placement" of perennials and shrubs that I purchased.

My garden has been an extension of my art and a source of my art ever since I created the garden over 25 years ago. After we built our house and learned about the aspects of living on ancient sand dunes in a sub-tropical climate, I planned out - on graph paper no less! - what plants to put where. I tried to combine the principles of garden composition and visual pleasures with the practical aspects of a huge amount of shade, sandy soil and a number of old shrubs that had been planted on the site when it was an oyster cannery. Oh - and speaking of which, I learned that planting in soil that is probably 90% oyster shells can be challenging!

Needless to say, over the years, the garden has evolved and matured, with the plants very much choosing where and how they wish to grow. For the most part, I have let nature dictate, for the results have in some ways been more harmonious than if I had adhered more to the carefully manicured look of my British gardening heritage. As a source of art, I tend to concentrate on single flowers or plants, rather than landscapes of the garden itself. Watercolours - I find - are not the easiest medium by which to convey masses of foliage and flowers. Drawings are more interesting to do.

Perhaps the most important element of the garden for my art is the actual peaceful environment it affords - a backdrop to my daily life and thus to my art-making. The constant visual stimulation and interest combine with my emotional attachment to this garden I created single-handedly. It is also the foreground frame to the marshes and saltwater creeks beyond. Together, these spaces offer tranquillity and the orderliness (most of the time!) of nature, the antidote to our ever-increasingly urbanised society.

Artists have long had deep attachments to gardens. Think of the wonderful details of flowers and animals on the frescoes in Egyptian tombs. Remember the jewel-like flowers and insects adorning monastic manuscripts from the 8th century onwards, like this 1470s Hastings Book of Hours. Artists over the centuries have travelled from medieval depictions of gardens as paradise to careful scientific examinations in modern times. Rubens was well aware of gardens as erotic playgrounds.

470s Hastings Book of Hours

But it was the 19th century artists who not only drew on gardens for inspiration in their art, but also themselves created their own very artistic gardens. Monet (whose 1900 painting The Garden in Flower is illustrated) is the most famous of these gardeners, with Giverny. (He had earlier been inspired and delighted when he visited glowing Mediterranean gardens, especially at Bordigher.)

The Garden in Flower, Giverny, 1900, oil on canvas, Claude Monet

Cézanne also painted and tended his Southern French garden, while Van Gogn celebrated gardens and what grew in them from his days in Holland onwards. Many of his drawings in the south of France, particularly those done during his period at St Rémy, are quite remarkable. So too are his paintings, such as this one, done in 1889,

Irises, Vincent van Gogh, 1889, oil on canvas, (Image courtesy of the Getty Center)

Almond Blossom, Vincent van Gogh, 1890, oil on canvas.(Image courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum)

As the resurgence of plein air art continues, many of the artists are also celebrating gardens in their art. It is important, for as the world continues to lose natural habitats at an ever-increasing rate, we artists can play an important role in showing how beautiful, intricate and serene-making gardens and nature can be.

"Washing away the Dust"

Autumn seems finally to be here, with a crisp sunny day that implored one to go out and enjoy it. I managed to get the chores of daily life either done or postponed and went out to draw, feeling a fraction harassed and short of time.

Then - bliss! I settled down to draw a wonderful old oak tree which had split in two. One portion had simply fallen over into the marsh mud, and has now died. But since it is a live oak, the graceful skeleton will remain as a frame for the marshes and salt water creek for many years. It was a peaceful afternoon with just soft bird songs and a gentle Labrador friend who came to greet me with a wagging tail.

The Fallen Oak, silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

I was working in silverpoint, so it was slow and meditative work. The world fell away from me, and by the time I had finished the small drawing, I was feeling much better, albeit a bit weary. I then remembered a wise statement (of the many!) that Pablo Picasso purportedly made. He remarked, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life". He was exactly right.

What We See as Artists

Having grappled for two days with an ever-evolving but beautifully perfumed ginger lily that I was trying to draw, it really resonated when I found a quote by Paul Klee. He said, "Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see."

I am always in amazement at the photo-realist artists who manage - often thanks to photographs - to reproduce in art exactly what seems to have been their subject matter. I find that when I am drawing or painting, I seem constitutionally incapable of reproducing exactly what I am seeing. I always want to alter something, move something elsewhere, eliminate something, exaggerate something else.. in an attempt to render a decent composition as well as an evocative work of art. Perhaps it is also the gardener in me - pruning, transplanting, fertilising; it does translate in a way to art-making!

I think that there is nothing more important for an artist than learning to see, really see – the nuances of light and shade, colour gradations, forms and shapes, how things interlock one to another. Life drawing is a wonderful way of training one's eye and making one's hand coordinate with one's eyes. Once really learning to look becomes second nature, then there is somehow an authenticity in what an artist is doing, even if it is not always realistic.

This painting is a perfect example of the results of his carefully looking at the scene and then transmuting what he saw into art.

Highways and Byways, Paul Klee, 1929, (Image courtesy of www.paulklee.net)

Think of how Paul Klee deals with this image of a flower, entitled Flower Myth.

Flower Myth, 1918, Paul Klee, (Image courtesy of the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany).

He does know very well how a flower is made and put together, but he is now comfortable with turning it into a work of art, because he has "seen" it properly before.

My sessions with my ginger lily obliged me to do somewhat similar alterations, simply becauseI looked and looked at the flowers, but tried to wend my way through their profusion and short life to produce a decent drawing.

Shadows

I have always loved the way shadows are the underlying abstraction in even the most realistic of paintings or drawings. Perhaps because I have spent so much time in countries where white walls are the most perfect surfaces for shadows, I frequently find them more interesting than their "source objects".

Leonardo daVinci once said, "Shadows have their boundaries at certain determinable points. He who is ignorant of those will produce work without relief; and the relief is the summit and the soul of painting." He was one of the pioneers of chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark that helps describe an object; before the Renaissance, artists did not depict objects or people using this system of darks and lights. Leonardo's study of hands and arms illustrates his study of the shadows that help define these arms and hands.

Study of Female Arms and Hands, Leonardo da Vinci (Image Courtesy of Royal Library, Windsor)

What is Leonardo's subtext is his message - look, look, look at what you are depicting. Study the way the light falls on the object. Examine the shadows, the way the shadow is darkest near the object and tapers out as it gets further from the object casting the shadow. Remember to look for the reflected light near the object that is bounced back into the shadow from any light-coloured object, like an egg.

The shadows define the curves and angles of every object, allowing us to understand their configurations - like a visual language whose vocabulary one needs to acquire and practice. As all the light outside comes from the sun, the shadows will move, change, evolve as the sun moves across the sky. Leonardo's Study for the Kneeling Leda, done with bold in hatching, shows what he was talking about in the use of shadows.

Study for a kneeling Leda, 1503-07
Black chalk, pen and ink on paper, 126 x 109 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Accurate observation of light, and thus shadows, will implicitly tell the viewer what times of day the artist was working, and even indicate at what latitude the painting was done if carefully examined. The constant change in light is one of the main challenges to plein air art. It is a non-stop gallop as one can never work fast enough, it seems, to catch up with the movement of light and shadows. That is where quick sketches indicating shadows and light angles can help greatly later on. The light situation is also one of the main reasons why artists resort to photographs as the shadows are suddenly frozen. Nonetheless, working solely from photos tends to produce airless art, even if it is easier and an artist can control the process a little better than just working plein air.

I am reminded that there is another dimension of this need to look at shadows to find the "relief" for a drawing - at the moment, I am in the middle of doing a silverpoint drawing of ginger lilies, those wonderful, fragrant white butterfly-like flowers. I picked the head with the buds half open. With the indoors warmth, the flowers are opening fast, changing all the time, and of course, the plays of lights and darks are constantly altering. Since silverpoint is slow, this is a constant juggling act to keep a coherent composition going, remain reasonably faithful to the flowers and yet use the light and shadows to tell about the graceful forms of these flowers. Using artificial light, even my faithful daylight-accurate Ott Lights, makes the shadows so harsh that it is not appealing, so I am working in daylight, with its own set of challenges.

Challenges, yes, but Leonardo was right – the play of light and shadow can be the summit and soul of a piece of art.

Drawing Nature

As I work with other silverpoint artists on finding exhibition venues for contemporary silverpoint drawings, I have had the luck and pleasure to "meet" some truly wonderful artists, even if we have not met face to face. Since, by definition, drawing in silver requires a very sure hand and an appreciation of subtleties of light, form, composition – these artists are good draughtsmen and women. It is fascinating to see the hugely diverse use of this medium, both in technique and content, especially considering that the technical parameters of silverpoint are narrower and much less flexible than, say, graphite.

One artist friend who deservedly has been garnering much success with his drawings is Timothy David Mayhew. Whilst he does the most magnificent paintings of animals and birds, as well as wonderful small plein air landscapes, it is his drawings that I find breathtaking. Elegant in the extreme, they are done with a variety of old master media and techniques that Timothy painstakingly researched and reconstructed for his personal use. Nature is his master and inspiration. Ever since I first got to know him a little, he has alluded to time spent in different - and often difficult - environments, where he hikes and observes, following animals and birds in their own habitat. The resultant artwork, often done in the field, rings true, because he knows his subject intimately.

Four studies of a black-crowned night heron, Timothy Mayhew West,  (Image courtesy of the Museum of Wildlife Art)

Timothy frequently wins both kudos and awards. Recently, for instance, at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, during the "Western Visions" exhibition, he was awarded the Robert Kuhn Award for a drawing entitled Study of a Gray Wolf wading in Water, a natural red chalk drawing. It was apparently a double delight for him as Bob Kuhn had been his friend and mentor, introducing him to drawing live animals together in studio and zoological settings.

Timothy David Mayhew, Right side study of a gray wolf wading in water, natural red chalk and natural white chalk, (Image courtesy of the artist)

Drawing Nature, in all its aspects, is always fascinating but extremely challenging. It requires endurance - there are always insects, heat, wind, sun, rain and humidity, difficult terrain, or a combination of them to deal with! Living creatures don't just stay obligingly still and in view. One needs to work quickly when opportunity presents itself. Once one has got organised on these aspects of art-making, it is often nothing short of a miracle to produce a work of art of consequence. Particularly one that is in silverpoint/metalpoint, chalk or any of the demanding and unforgiving media that Timothy uses.

It is well worth checking out Timothy David Mayhew's work. His drawings sing.

Celebrating Drawing

It used to be that drawing and drawing exhibitions were almost a rarity, not too many years ago. Now, wonderfully, it seems to be the opposite situation.

I thought about these contrasts when I read that Pat Steir, a pioneer in redefining drawing in America, is having a 25-year retrospective at the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY. Pat Steir: Drawing out of Line was first shown at the Rhode Island School of Design and has just opened at the Neuberger, until mid-December. I remember seeing her huge wave drawings back in the eighties. Impressive in size and even more impressive in their energy and vigour, they were done on long rolls of paper attached together. Steir made her abstract, flowing marks almost in dance movements, using her whole body, to attain a powerful fluidity that was very individual. Yet there was something about this motion of the drawings that brought one back to Hokusai's waves, as if both artists were tapping into underlying forces of nature. Steir dared to do things differently and redefine what drawing was all about, whether it was later depicting waterfalls almost by force of sheer gravity, or returning to minimal line in her most recent work.

Wind and Water', color soap ground, aquatint with soap ground , aquatint reversal, spit bite aquatint and drypoint, Pat Steir, 1996 (Image courtesy of the artist)

In another reminder of how important drawing has become to so many people today - just check out the Web for Internet-driven group drawing events such as Urban Sketches , SketchCrawl or Drawing Day 2010 - I read with amusement an article entitled "Naked All Night" in the September 2010 issue of American Artist. Like the Drawing Marathons run for a number of years by Graham Nickson at the New York Studio School, Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY, has apparently been running an annual Draw-a-Thon for the last 22 years, during which some 550 people turned up to draw for seven hours, all night. Seven drawing studios, six drummers, pizza and soda and lots of enthusiasm for artists of all stripes – and apparently about 200 people lasted through the whole night. That is an eloquent testimony to today's state of drawing, I'd say!