Stumbling on Beauty

Once in a while, in one of the art newsletters that I receive, I read something that really piques my interest. That happened today in a newsletter that I get periodically from Australia, ArtHIVES. There was an announcement about an artist now living in Brisbane who is short-listed for an art prize in Albany, Western Australia - Nicola Moss.

Looking at her website, and reading her comments about creating some of this beautiful art was rewarding. Not only does she create very sophisticated and compelling paintings, but her observations about the intricacies and fascinations of the natural world in which she works really resonate with me. Her concern for the viability of the natural environment in its tug of war with urban construction seems to underlie a lot of what she does. In her blog, "Layers of Life", she talks too of the time she spends working plein air. All artists seem to deal with the same elations and difficulties when working outdoors, no matter in what country. Nicola clearly has an eye for the small, subtle and elegant as she explores the amazing Australian biodiversity. Nonetheless, her resultant paintings are universal in their appeal.

It is worth going through the links to her website and clicking on the galleries to see her work. Nonetheless, thanks to Nicola Moss, I stumbled on a series of beautiful paintings today.

This Spring and the Next, Nicola Moss artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

I walked along the water's edge – Magic happens here, Nicola Moss artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

"Enchantment"

Some while ago, I received an e-mail from Guy Kawasaki, of Alltop.com, asking if I would like to review his latest book, "Enchantment", prior to its launch on March 8th, 2011. I agreed to do so, because, as an artist, I was interested to see what I might learn from the book, given that its subtitle is "The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions".

As I read through this relatively slender and very accessible book, replete with lists of suggested actions and real life stories to illustrate Guy's points, I had to chuckle. At one point in the book, in the chapter on "How to launch", Guy discusses the virtues of planting "many seeds". Given that the Internet has changed the traditional approaches to marketing upside down, he advises that one should "embrace the nobodies", because "anyone who understands and embraces your cause and wants to spread the word is worthy of your attention". He was carrying out his own modus operandi exactly when he asked me to review the book!

Nonetheless, I think this book, "Enchantment" can teach - or remind - every artist about a number of important aspects of his/her profession. As in many other ventures, art is ultimately about a conversation, a mutual acceptance and understanding, a shared passion about work that an artist creates in some medium. The more that artist can reach out to find a receptive, appreciative audience, the more successful he or she can be, not only in financial terms but in personal fulfilment. Accepting others, meeting people and maintaining frequent personal contact are pathways Guy advocates in this book. Achieving trustworthiness through what is known as noblesse oblige or a "Mensch" in the full Yiddish sense of the word, along with honesty, integrity and generosity, is another of the chapters in "Enchantment": vital conduct for a successful artist.

There are some examples of how to connect with one's potential audience/public which illustrate how memorably to explain why one creates a piece of art, and how it can connect with the viewer. Let's face it - most people love learning the "back story" about any piece of art and the artist's reasons for making it. Early in the book, Guy quotes Vincent van Gogh saying "You have first to experience what you want to express." If you can communicate your passion and knowledge about your artwork, people are far more receptive to it because they have embraced, to a degree, that creative act.

Guy also makes a wonderful case for how to get a potential collector first to acquire a small piece of art, which often leads to later sales of bigger work. As he later says, "Enchanters don't sell products, services or companies. Enchanters sell their dreams for a better future - cooler social interactions, a cleaner environment, a heart-stirring driving experience, or the future of publishing." Art is quintessentially about selling dreams. Guy elaborates cogently on how to sell those dreams.

The last major portion of "Enchantment" is a very useful commentary on the merits of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the Web in general in terms of using this technology to achieve successful enchantment. Any artist would find useful comments in this section. Guy's Facebook page for the book carries out his own advice. Indeed, he is offering his previous book for free with "Enchantment" until midnight tonight as another "enchanting" action.

Guy Kawasaki enthusiastically makes a case for walking a path to success - professionally and personally - that is honourable, proactive, imaginative but above all that contributes to making our world a better place. He even provides interest and delight - indeed enchantment - when he creates an origami  butterfly to put on the book's cover.

It takes Dedicated People to Achieve Things

Today is a day of sad remembrance for a wonderful friend who has just slipped away - Lillian Schaitberger, late of McIntosh County.

Rundle, my husband, and I met Lil, as she was affectionately called, through the local historical society, the Lower Altamaha Historical Society, soon after we moved to Georgia. She was the meticulous, dedicated treasurer of the society's funds, amongst many other virtues.

When Rundle was asked to spearhead an effort to get a replica of the 1721 blockhouse built at Fort King George Historical Site, in Darien, he accepted on one condition: that Lil Schaitberger be the treasurer of any fund-raising effort. She accepted... and the odyssey of the next two years of fund-raising meant that Lil became a very close friend and ally. Her dedication kept us all going. The funds were raised, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources kept their part of the bargain and the replica blockhouse was built according to the original blue prints drawn up in the early 18th century by John Barnwell. The dedication and opening of the Fort at Fort King George in autumn 1988 meant that Lil Schaitberger, Rundle Cook and many others could heave a sigh of relief.

Lil did much more, however, for her two British friends, in terms of dedication. I had written the draft of a book, "Fort King George: Step One to Statehood", potentially to help with the fund-raising. I had put it away in a drawer, until the Mills B. Lane Foundation generously underwrote its publication in 1990. When the pallets of books were delivered, it was to Lil's garage that they had to go for storage – she was doing far more than being treasurer for the venture. I was desperate to free up her garage and eventually "sold" the books to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. With those monies, I was able to pay for the first of the replica cannon that are now fired out across the marshes to help recreate for today's visitors what life was like during the brief existence of the Fort in the 18th century. I requested that the cannon be dedicated to Howard J. Morrison, Jr. whose grant, through the Mills B. Lane Foundation, had been the seed money that validated the original fund-drive to build the blockhouse. Lil could at last park her car again in her garage!

Her wonderful friendship and dedication allowed another venture to succeed. In 1992, for the Quincentennial, under the aegis of a number of historical societies and universities, the book, seminar, video and relevant map, "Columbus and the Land of Ayllón" became reality in Darien, Georgia. This huge venture, which eventually spanned a number of years, sought to highlight Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's ill-fated 1526 settlement, San Miguel de Gualdape, possibly in or near Sapelo Sound, McIntosh County. Lil was again my treasurer for this complex, Hydra-headed endeavour and without her hard work and dedication, it would have been infinitely more complicated. After the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia requested to take over the Ayllón project so that it could be taught in Georgia schools, I accepted with alacrity, mainly because I could thus stop imposing on Lil's kindness and patience.

Lil was active in many, many other ventures in the County. Her courage and dedication were always a source of great admiration for us, and her sense of humour a joy. She epitomised the American "can do" attitude; her achievements, large and small, leave the County infinitely richer. Most of all, she was a true-blue friend to us.

Mark-making - Playing with Fire

My artist friends in the silverpoint world are always guaranteed to surprise and delight with their creative inventiveness. I have just had a fresh reminder of this when Jane Masters, a fellow British/French import to the Northeast, sent me a notice about a show which she has just had at the Miller Block Gallery in Boston. She is a most successful artist with a wonderful resume of achievements to her name.

INstallaation View, Miller Bock Gallery show, Jane Masters

Entitled "Playing with Fire", this was clearly a most unusual exhibition and very well reviewed in the Boston Globe. This is an installation view of the exhibition she sent me.

Jane has, in addition to her wonderful silverpoint drawings, been extending her vocabulary to include mark-making by burning hand-forged steel brands on heavy-weight Arches watercolour paper. The resultant burnt drawings are wonderfully eloquent and energetic: the richly-hued burned marks and remaining smoke marks combine to form complex, sophisticated dances on the paper.

The images below are examples of this work.

Playing with Fire Curve, Jane Masters artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

Playing with Fire Circle, Jane Masters artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

Playing with Fire, Playing with Fire announcement, Jane Masters artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

The works  (Playing with Fire - circle) and  (Playing with Fire - Curve) are full 22 x 30" sheets of watercolour, while the centre image is a panel of four full watercolour sheets, or what is left of them after the creative and elemental forces are done. I am left awestruck, not only at the sheer dedication and skill of making such drawings, but also by the fact that beforehand, Jane makes the steel brands by hand-forging them. That is a labour of love and passion.

Jane shows the same passion (which I had seen in her silverpoints) when she also uses heated needles to pierce holes through the paper to create pinhole drawings that make me think of Victorian samplers, albeit with a lovely sense of humour in the messages she includes.

Jane Masters reminds me that there is such a multiplicity of ways to make marks on paper that become wondrous drawings. All it takes is creativity and passion. Bravo, Jane!

Private Art, Public Response

Every artist is sometimes impelled to create art that is not really intended for the big wide world. It is art that is perhaps made in reaction to a situation, a response to something that is joyful, troubling or passion-stirring. Often, that work is put away and not displayed in public.

This has happened to me several times, and my flat file drawers can attest to these drawings and paintings. However, once in a while, there is a situation where I suddenly remember one that seems to answer the parameters of some juried exhibition, and I think, well, it is worth a try.

Vertebral Distractions, silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

The San Diego chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art has started running an on-line series of juried shows. One of them, "Transformation", seemed an appropriate place to enter one of my "private art" silverpoint drawings, Vertebral Distractions. I had created it from a small print out that my husband had been given at the Mayo Clinic after a portion of his spine had been examined. This small image was eloquent proof of why he suffers so much from chronic pain. 

I was so dismayed for him that I tried to think of all the every day joys surrounding us that could distract him - perhaps! - from his pain. It was a moment when we had a juvenile  Black-Crowned Heron who had adopted a shallow bird bath on our front deck as his personal pond for the summer. Meanwhile, the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds were flying their marvellous looping displays, butterflies flittered and the phalaenopsis orchids were a-bloom.

I was thus delighted to learn that I had won a prize for this silverpoint drawing, Vertebral Distractions, in the SD-WCA show. It was a double validation from the Judge, Hazel Ross, because, as I have said, this was a very private work, not intended for public viewing. It makes me realise afresh that no matter what one's original intentions, if an artist creates something born of deep feelings, it will resonate with someone, somewhere... the eternal conversations of human creativity.

Backroom aspects of being an Artist

Whenever I paint a watercolour, I then record it in digital fashion and, frequently, I continue to use up my stock of Kodak ASA25 35mm slide film as I am still straddling the two systems. I far prefer the Kodak version because the slide film is superior for colour rendition on most watercolour paintings. As long as I use a grey card, a tripod and a decent camera, I can pretty well ensure decent photographs - the old-fashioned way.

Photographing digitally is another subject altogether and I know reams have been written about how to take good digital photographs of paintings. My personal experience is that the surface of most cold pressed watercolour papers bounces the light all over the place and consequently, photos come out pallid and with very unimpressive colour fidelity. I usually only photograph big watercolours, and then resign myself to a long session in Adobe Photoshop, with the painting beside me to guide me back to colour accuracy.

For smaller works, both watercolours and silverpoint drawings, I have been using a flatbed scanner for ages. I had a really good Epson scanner (courtesy of my husband's careful choice), but alas, it gave up the ghost and I had to replace it. Now I have a large format Mustek scanner installed, and it does help that I don't have to knit so many images together from several scans.

The Bend in the Creek, watercolour, Jeannine Cook artist

Nonetheless, I conclude that I am into the same unbelievably time-consuming colour adjustments that I endure with digital photographs. Somehow, even with the best settings possible, the scanner does not like that slightly rough paper surface and all sorts of odd colours appear. Pulling the work back to what it really looks like is almost a question of luck versus skill. It seems almost as labour-intensive as actually painting a watercolour, which is ironic. The image is a recent watercolour, The Bend in the Creek. It cost me too many hours of scanning adjustments!

I wonder if other watercolour artists have the same problems? These backroom aspects to art are definitely not my favourite pastimes, but are necessary in the business of art. Back to the old adage of there being "no such thing as a free lunch"!

"Singing" of Spring

These days of warm springlike weather are absolutely irresistible! I should be doing all sorts of other things, but I find myself rushing out to paint - for the sheer joy of being outdoors as an artist!

Of course, it is then instant humbleness as I struggle to accomplish what I hope to paint. The wind blows, the gnats arrive and I can't believe that what I deemed to be straightforward has suddenly become complicated. But underlying the whole experience is harmony, of "singing true" and almost a sense of completeness: I am privileged to be doing what I love to do, in a beautiful spring world.

I think Ingres knew about this sense of plenitude and harmony, in his paintings but also when he was drawing his astonishing graphite pencil portraits or his landscape drawings in Rome. He wrote, "Everything in nature is harmony; a little too much, or else too little, disturbs the scale and makes a false note. One must teach the point of singing true with the pencil or with brush as much as with the voice; rightness of forms is like rightness of sounds."

View of the Villa Medici, Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres, 1807, pencil on paper (Image courtesy of Musée Ingres, Montauban, France

Urson Jules Vatinelle (1788-1881) 1820, graphite on paper, Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres, (Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Somehow, the close observation of one's surroundings and an effort to create a harmonious composition and luminous painting help to make one grow as an artist. That always helps make life more fulfilling.

Artists' Evolution

As the years pass and an artist continues to work and create art, it is often interesting to follow the evolution of what the artist creates. Sometimes an artist is "cursed with success" at an early age and is tempted to continue producing art in the winning formula, without much incentive to try new things and push for growth.

Every great artist shows change and development during his or her career - one only has to remember Vincent Van Gogh or Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet or Pablo Picasso, to name some artists rather at random. It should be axiomatic that artists evolve in their art for as human beings, we all change and develop as the years pass. Nonetheless, some artists are more dramatic in their evolution than others.

I was reminded about these potential huge leaps and changes that artists can make when I was reading about an exhibition running until 20th March at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Entitled Bridget Riley: From Life, it is a selection of the drawings that Riley did as a student at Goldsmiths College, London, in 1949-52. Most people think of Bridget Riley's work as the vibrant, brilliantly coloured, rhythmic compositions that dance and swoop in patterns in almost strobe-like fashion. An exhibition of such paintings, energetic and elegant, is also on view until May 22nd at the National Gallery, London.

Older Woman Looking Down, c. 1950, Bridget Riley (Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

Nonetheless, the drawings shown at the Portrait Gallery remind us that she started out very much involved and passionate about drawing from life, as well as closely studying the works of great artists - Raphael, Rembrandt, Ingres, Seurat, etc. - in the print room at the British Museum. Her drawings, such as Older Woman looking down, 1950, underscore the value she places on keen observation. She catches the sense of the body in space, how the head feels as the woman tilts her head reflectively, the resigned expression in the eyes. Riley's drawing practice helped her refine her immaculate sense of structure and taught her that there is a continuity in art's concerns down the ages. Her own drawing and her study of the Old Masters, she explains, "gave me the means to embark on my own work with confidence, and to this day this particular knowledge forms the basis of everything I do in the studio." As Andrew Lambirth also remarks in an article in the 5th February edition of The Spectator, "drawing gave her the necessary exercise in looking and organising information, and the means of bringing eye, hand and mind into fruitful relationship."

It is inspiring to measure the trajectory of such an artist: the serious art student carefully observing her portrait model at Goldsmiths evolves into a richly inventive, energetically wonderful painter, creating memorable abstract art, yet still closely linked to the great painters of the past.

Apricot and Pink, oil on linen, 2001, Bridget Riley (Image courtesy of the artist)

Lines and Swirls, Dots and Spashes

I am always fascinated to see the work of fellow artists in any group to which I belong in some fashion. The annual exhibitions of groups into which one has to be juried in some (often stringent) fashion are one example. The catalogues of shows by the National Association of Women Artists, the American Artists Professional League, Catherine Lorilliard Wolfe Art Club, the Pen and Brush or Georgia Watercolor Society, for instance, are wonderfully diverse, frequently of very high quality, and decidedly interesting overall.

Another group whose work I viewed today on the Web is formed by very distinguished artists whose work is in the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, England. This is the pre-eminent collection of women's artworks in Great Britain. Artists in the collection were sent a small piece of paper and asked to create original art for auction on line to raise money for maintenance of the collection. I did a silverpoint drawing of an old cedar tree base, Cedar Lace.

Cedar Lace. silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist, private collection

Looking at the work now offered for auction on the New Hall website reminded me, once again, of the wonderful diversity of approach we all have as artists. Since each one of us had the same size piece of paper on which to work, it makes it even more interesting to see what each person has done. Lines and swirls, dots and splashes are indeed in evidence, with celebrations of so many different voices and ways of expression. New Hall has very sensibly made the initial bid very modest - £20 or $32.50 - and then you can bid in £5/$8 increments. Not bad at all as a way to own some of the top British artists' work.

I am reminded of the French exclamation: Vive la différence! It all makes for such an interesting world.

A Dedication to Line-making

There is a very talented and dedicated artist whose work is currently on display at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia - Curtis Bartone. His ability to make lines sing and tell dense, thoughtful stories is remarkable.

I first met Curtis when we both were part of the 2006 Luster of Silversilverpoint exhibition at the Telfair Museum, and we later coincided with the second Luster of Silver exhibition at the Evansville Museum of Arts, Evansville, IN in 2009. When I first saw Curtis' fine lines in his silverpoint drawings, I was impressed and intrigued, for he uses his skills to make thought-provoking juxtapositions of human activity and nature.

Curtis Bartone; Forbidden, 2009; Lithograph on Arches 88; 22 x 28 inches; Courtesy of the Artist

In his current large exhibition at the Telfair, Domain: Drawings, Etchings and Lithographs, which runs from February 4th to June 26th, 2011, Curtis Bartone pulls one into realms that challenge one's assumptions about life on our planet, while leaving the viewer marvelling at his skills in etching and lithography, as well as in creating huge graphite or charcoal drawings and luminous silverpoints. Every work rewards careful study, like the print shown here, entitled Forbidden. In each drawing or print, dense lines build up compositions of flora and fauna against backdrops that jar, challenge and provoke our concepts of how we humans coexist with nature.

Domain is an exhibition that warrants repeated visits. The printer's skill and the draughtsman's skill, allied to an intense, informed series of disturbingly beautiful yet troubling messages, are such that you can't absorb everything all at one visit. Go and celebrate a master "line-maker" and draughtsman. Bravo, Curtis!