Art and the Perception of Time / August 9, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

An artist residency in a beautiful place such as the medieval village of Noyers sur Serein in Burgundy, France, leads to reflections on how one perceives time. All around in the village are beautiful buildings that date from the 15th century, houses that are still occupied, loved and cared for.

Old home and barn, Noyers, photo J. Cook

The lovely church, whose bells sonorously mark the passage of the hours, is visibly marked by the six centuries that it has known.

The 15th century church, Noyers, photo J. Cook

The cobbled streets are a reminder of other ways of transport, inducing strolls along the streets rather than a hurried drive though by car. The village is delineated by its arched entrances and the towers that guarded its confines in more bellicose times of yore, after 1419 when the Dukes of Burgundy held sway, sometimes by force.

Ancient tower guarding Noyers, photo J. Cook

In other words, time in some ways has been held in abeyance. There is the sense that visitors and inhabitants alike can slip backwards through the centuries to earlier, slower times. One's perception of historical time is constantly reinforced, with reminders that man has lived in this village for an extremely long time. Even the peaceful cattle grazing in fields on the village edge reinforce the sense of timelessness.

Cattle grazing just outside Noyers, photo J. Cook

Because the village is small, the sense of unity and harmony is reinforced. Flowers everywhere and walled gardens attached to most houses enhance the desire simply to slow down, delight in the beauty and forget the outside, fast-tempo world. When I was there last week, the Noyers Music Festival, a delight in itself, brought young musicians in for master classes and music floated out of open windows throughout the village as residents opened their homes to the students to practice and lodge. Again, time slowed in delight.

Meanwhile, as an artist, I was busy drawing, hard at work on my venture of trying to marry metalpoint to aspects of Burgundy's monastic and wine-producing history. As every artist knows, as soon as you start trying to create a piece of art, time and its perception become merely an abstraction. You lose all sense of time. The only tempo that I find is imposed on me, as the hours slip by unperceived, is the need to stop to rest my eyes and have a cup of tea and something to eat, to refuel.

The days melted away almost imperceptibly for me. It was a strange sensation, in truth. Whilst drawing, I had absolutely no sense of the passage of the hours. Yet as soon as I stepped outside La Porte Peinte, I was constantly reminded of the other dimensions of time, with so much history visible that marked the passage of centuries. And yet that passage of time is almost frozen in a medieval village that has so carefully preserved its heritage.

So many ways to measure time, all during a magical time creating metalpoint drawings.It seems to me that occasionally, we all need to remember that time need not be marked by the relentless technology of today that corrals us into a frenzied way of life. We risk ending up divorced from aspects of life that bring us peace and joy as they link us to nature and our collective heritage.

Burgundy and Art / July 27, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

It is hard to believe that the days can flash past so quickly, but I have spent four full days already here at Noyers sur Serein at La Porte Peinte for the first part of my artist residency. I flew to Paris and drove across a world of wondrously wide and luminously golden harvested cereal fields. La belle France! The home front finally has calmed a little, with health stable and so I was able to slip away to come here. The exciting events since I arrived – I hung my artwork as part of the overarching exhibit, Quotidiaen, here at the La Porte Peinte gallery. It is metalpoint work that I did as a result of my residency last year which I framed for exhibiting and brought with me. My part is entitled Les Pierres qui Chantent: Dessins en Pointe de Metal.

Les Pierres qui Chantent exhibit, July 2015 - La Porte Peinte, Noyers. Artist Jeannine Cook

The other exciting news is that indeed I will be able to exhibit work that I am currently producing in the Noyers Museum in September. I am also preparing an informal talk about it all and about metalpoint in general for the Journées de la Patrimoine in September, when France’s wonderful patrimony is celebrated.

So thanks to all my generous friends who helped me reach the Hatchfund funding goal for this residency atLa Porte Peinte, I am organized!

Now, of course, has come the other aspect of this venture – producing artwork. I have been working hard, perched in my magical eerie above the cobbled main square in Noyers, with the sounds of French, mingled with laughter, that drift up to the open window. The delicious swallows are still flying ceaselessly, calling and swirling as they dart in to feed their babies in their beautiful mud nests attached to the medieval oak beams of the porches and roofs. As I am high up, I see the flash of their white rumps and black wings in their aerial ballet beneath me – the perfect accompaniment to metalpoint’s black and white.

I have just finished the third in the initial series of the project drawings – Burgundia – as Burgundy was named from Roman times onwards. I have tried to marry the main themes of the project together – fossilized shells, metalpoint, wine and the “horror vacui” of medieval manuscripts with their lettering in brilliant colour and details of nature covering each page. I managed to photograph one drawing – with complications – as normal scanners will not reproduce all the “whispered” lines in silver. The others will have to await my return home!

Burgundia II. silverpoint-watercolour. Artist Jeannine Cook

Step by step, line by line – what fun!

Forms of Still Life / July 10, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

Inching my way back from the roles of hospital companion and guardian to my husband as he recovered from an emergency operation, I finally felt I could slip back into my artist world a little. It was a welcome move as there is nothing more debilitating, for patient and family, than sojourns in a hospital. My first treat to myself was to see a recently opened small exhibition at the Museu Fundacion Juan March in Palma de Mallorca. Entitled "Things: The Idea of Still life in Photography and Painting", it straddled 17th century Dutch still life paintings and late nineteenth-early twentieth century photographs.

It was a really interesting premise, examining the forms of still life and even the cultural differences in the use of the word, "still life". The German and English versions of the words echo the original Dutch/Flemish concept of examples of things that are faithfully recorded in a carefully organised composition. But the Spanish "naturaleza muerta" or 'bodegon" stray far from the original premise. Most of the work presented represented northern artists, thus closer to the true sense of still life.

The Dutch paintings were lovely small ones, where the artists had delighted in the play of light on a glass goblet or a small ceramic dish, spoon or the crisp glint of a peeled lemon.

Willem Heda, Still Life with a Roemer, Bread and a Lemon, c. 1640-43. Colección particular

The leap to the early medium of photograph to record still life that, mostly, was pre-composed, was interesting. Sometimes, the photographs seemed airless, compared to the paintings, still a characteristic of many photographs today when compared to paintings. Yet there was an elegance and refinement in the photographs that were distinctive. As always, I seem to prefer the very simple compositions - such as one by Baron Adolphe de Meyer taken in 1908 of two hydrangea flowers in a glass of water, the reflections of the glass playing out on the wide expanse of the surface in the lower third of the photogravure.

Barón Adolphe de Meyer, Naturaleza muerta, 1908. Colección Dietmar Siegert

The selection of photographic still life works was wide-ranging - from daguerreotypes to a coloured autochrome coloured back-lit plate of flowers by the Lumiere Brothers done in 1908, a circa 1895 trichromatic print of flowers (so much for all our modern "inventions" of technicolour) and then into the more modernist 1920-60 black and white work by Man Ray, Walker Evans, and many other European photographers.

Josef Sudek, From the series "The Window of my Studio", 1940-54, gelatin silver print, Dietmar Siegert Collection

Every interpretation of still life was there one could imagine - from carefully set up compositions, to views of life made still in abattoirs or after a volcanic eruption to Walker Evans spotting a natural still life scene on a back porch of a (sharecropper?) weather-beaten clapboard house.

Walker Evans, Washstand in the dog run of Floyd Burroughs's cadbin, Hale County, Alabama, Summer 1936, gelatin silver print, Dietmar Siegert Collection

As I looked at the different compositions and the elements that made up those compositions, mainly derived from nature, I could not help realising that most of my current artwork is, de facto, still life. I am using elements of nature in compositions that record stones, bark, flowers --stilled by being placed in a setting other than their original one. I have only strayed a little, like many other artists, from the path of still life "inventor" artists of the seventeenth century by cropping, zooming in on some elements and eliminating others, framing and thus altering the original concept and layout of the still life set up.

Cedar Swirls, silver-goldpoint on black ground, Jeannine Cook artist

I love feeling this sense of kinship and heritage that comes when you look at artwork from previous times and understand how and why you do things the way you do, thanks to those earlier artists.

Thoughts on Crowdfunding for Art Projects / June 19, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

You certainly learn by doing! I decided to do a crowd-funding project on Hatchfund as an experiment, to push out frontiers as an artist and hopefully to give good publicity to a very worthy cause, the artist residences at La Porte Peinte, in Noyers, France.

The first frontier I had to extend was getting into video-making, an area I had not yet visited. I met charming video-makers and although the first video was not what I hoped for, simply because I was utterly inarticulate with 'flu at the time, the second was better because I was more coherent and able to talk.

I am fascinated with the idea I developed - namely to try to marry together the metalpoint monastic heritage that flowered in Burgundy and elsewhere, the wine-producing heritage there and the extraordinary fossilised oyster shells found in stones lying in some Chablis vineyards. It will be a really interesting challenge to weave these strands together into viable art. I suppose that is what art residencies are for - peace and time for experiments!

La diète de salut. France, Burgundy, c. 1490 (Image courtesy of the Morgani Library, New York)

Chablis Stones 1 small — Chablis Stones containing Fossilised Oyster Shells

However, the other, and perhaps most time-consuming, aspect of my crowd-funding venture has been the actual fund-raising. I clearly had not thought through all the implications of such a project. Nonetheless, I soon found myself sitting down and writing to friends and supporters who have been wonderful enough to collect my art over the years.

I have to say the results have mostly been heart-warming and gratifying. There have of course been days of nothing at all happening, no one even acknowledging my e-mails, but then, out of the blue, comes a short e-mail from Hatchfund saying that such and such a person has supported the project.

Slowly the figures have crept up, until two days ago, I realised with a shock that I had passed the magic threshold mark of the minimum amount needed to fund the project and thus release the funds to me. What a relief!

En route to that point, I have learned a few aspects of this crowd-funding world. The first is distinctly cultural: I realise that a British background of not blowing one's own trumpet and not putting oneself forward does not prepare one well for the necessary soliciting of funds. Americans seem to have no such problems. The second is that the American way seems to require a considerable amount of outright hucksterism, two-for-the-price-of-one department. I think one has to be selective in approaches, depending on the type of project one is trying to promote.

The third and last consideration I have found to be interesting. In an era that supposedly has everyone fully converted to and comfortable with on-line financial transactions, there is still a high proportion of people very reticent indeed about putting a credit card on-line. Cheques still retain a high degree of reliability and safety to many people and on-line fraud is a very real threat.

However, towards the end of the Hatchfund fund-raising period on my Art Residency at La Porte Peinte, I am beginning to feel that it has been a good thing to have done. Mostly because it has given me reason to touch base with friends and supporters with whom I might not have exchanged news and greetings until later in the years. Also too, such a project, willy-nilly, forces one to measure oneself out there in the big, wild world -- and it is always nice to find that it is possible to bob along and keep afloat in the choppy waters of competition.

Thank you all, my generous supporters. And to my other friends from whom I have not heard, I hope to hear from you, especially to hear that your summer is going along happily.

Video on Metalpoint and its Ins and Outs / May 30, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

I have just received this video that video-maker Derek Gauvain made for me to celebrate metalpoint drawing. Check it out:

The Magic of Metalpoint Drawing from Jeannine Cook on Vimeo.

Crowd-Funding with Hatchfund for a Metalpoint-Drawing Residency in Burgundy / May 24, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

I firmly believe that every artist should be open to new ventures, both in creating art and then in finding ways to reach other people who might share a passion for that type of art. There are always new and potentially fascinating horizons to explore. In that spirit, I have just embarked on a crowd-funding venture with AIM Hatchfund to fund an artist residency at La Porte Peinte, in Noyers sur Serein, Burgundy. All the details are at the Hatchfund website - both in video form and in text form.

La-Porte-Peinte, Noyers sur Serein, Burgundy, France

Basically I have until 4th July to raise a minimum of $3000 to help defray the costs of going to Noyers to create a body of metalpoint drawings that weave together some fascinating but seemingly disparate aspects of life in Burgundy. Not only was the region a famed centre of monastic production of illuminated manuscripts.

Book of Hours, Paris 1430-35 - March (Image courtesy of the Morgan Library, New York)

Detail of Book of Hours, March. Paris 1430-35 (Image courtesy of the Morgan Library)

Its renown too as a wine-producing region, thanks to those same industrious monks (and the Romans before them!), is sometimes enhanced by vines planted in soils rich in 150 million year old fossilised minute oyster shells that confer a unique “terroir” hallmark, particularly in the Chablis area.

Burgundy -Chablis-Le-Clos (Image courtesy of Mick Rock, photographer)

Chablis, Kimmeridgian stone containing fossilised oyster shells (J. Cook photographer)

The link for me in these two facts? Metalpoint drawing. Metalpoint is a medium born in medieval monasteries where monks used lead styli to delineate illuminations and draw the lines for their beautiful manuscripts. After a chequered history, metalpoint is currently undergoing a third renaissance. My passion for this subtle, shimmering medium dates from the early 1980s. I use mainly gold, silver and copper to make marks on prepared paper; the lines cannot be erased, and silver and copper will evolve in colour as they tarnish, making the medium even more alive.

Huitres de Chablis I , silverpoint-Prismacolor, Jeannine Cook artist

Wine-making, illuminating manuscripts and drawing in silver and other metals are all activities where time has a very different rhythm compared to much of today’s world. We often need reminders that at times, a slower pace of life can bring joy, fascination and quiet rewards. A body of metalpoint drawings can serve as such a reminder.

With those thoughts in mind, I have just uploaded all the required information, video and text to Hatchfund, had the staff approve the contents and make it live. And now I have to hope that other kind people share my optic that travelling though time and different worlds is always fascinating. By making a tax-free donation to this metalpoint drawing project, I would have the pleasure of sending a thank you gift to contributors and then taking them along with me on the path of creating the art, thanks to technology.

Dear reader, share the fun of creation with me!

The Fascination of Butterflies / May 20, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

Detail-of-Marginal-scene-of-man-ploughing-with-oxen-with-butterfly-above-Gorleston-Psalter-England-14th-century.png

Talking to a friend the other day about encouraging people to create or recreate habitat for butterflies along the coast of Georgia, it made me think immediately of the role butterflies have always played in art. I love their messages of beauty, lightness and grace, allied to their incredible ability to survive long, taxing journeys and terrible adverse weather. They add a lilt to life and still the passage of time for a moment as you watch them float from flower to flower in the sunshine. The art created about butterflies also has a timelessness and beauty in so many instances. Medieval manuscripts frequently incorporated butterflies in their marvellous illuminations and paintings.

Libro d'ore Rothschild, Flanders, 1500-1520, private collection

Remember, these amazing images were being created at a time when only careful observation and dead specimens were the means of recording - no cameras!

Detail of border with flowers, moths, flies - Hours of Joanna I of Castille, Netherlands, c. 1500 British Library

This heritage of celebrating butterflies continued and continues down the centuries.

Snowdrops and a painted lady, Jacques Le Moyne des Morgues, c. 1575 (Victoria & Albert Museum)

Paintings of Flowers, Butterflies and Insects, late 16th century, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues

This is just a sampling that I found when I went looking to share images that the wonderful early artists created, showing their love of butterflies. It was a love, too, over and above the entomology that was already beginning to be important. This was a love of beauty in its most fragile and exquisite form.

No wonder my friend wants to ensure that the butterflies of today live safely and well along the coast of Georgia and far beyond. It is not only artists who celebrate these wondrous insects.

Transformations / May 17, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

Transformations from the object an artist is viewing to the art created always seem like magic. No matter how lucid an explanation is given about how the artist gets from point A, the subject matter, to point B, the resultant artwork, there always seems to be another dimension. Perhaps that is because none of us can really get into the head of another human being, no matter how. Each of us is that proverbial "island unto ourselves" and that includes the conscious or subconscious process by which art is created. Of course, there is that other aspect - that the art that happens is also somewhat of a mystery to the artist as well. Each artist really never knows what is going to happen during the art-making process, no matter how carefully the preparation is done, or how meticulously laid out the plan for the work.

Personally, I am learning, slowly, simply to trust that small voice inside my head that says, "look hard at what you are seeing, allow your eye to select the next aspect to draw or paint, and just go with the zeitgeist of that moment of creation." In other words, relax, don't think too hard and work intuitively as much as possible. I have also come to realise, with time, that whether I like it or not, my life experiences, my personality - who I am - will come through my art, for good or for bad.

I was trying simply to live intuitively in the moment last week when I had one of my rare, precious times to draw en plein air. I found an amazing live oak "sculpture" of the remains of a mighty tree - just the stump, the essence of sinews and strength.

Live Oak Tree Stump I, photographer J. Cook

Live Oak Tree Stump II, photographer J. Cook

The sunlight was shining on parts like a floodlight, and they sang. The only trouble was that of course, the sun moved, the light changed and other parts began to be more visible and the aspects that had interested me simply faded into shadow! Paciencia, as the Spanish say!

Nonetheless, by the end of the time spent in peace and fascination, I had done some small metalpoints. They are a version of this mysterious alchemy of transformations.

Rhythms of Oak, silverpoint-Prismacolor, artist Jeannine Cook

Live Oak Lingering, gold-silverpoint, artist Jeannine Cook

The Intensity of Size - Big or Small in Art / April 19, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

When I went to see the Richard Diebenkorn survey at the Royal Academy in London recently, I found it interesting but was surprised at my lack of excitement at seeing most of the work. The Ocean Park series on display were, of course, the most lyrical, but again, I was reminded of an internal conversation I frequently have with myself. Does a really big canvas manage to convey the intensity of the artist's passion? Or does the sheer size become, in many cases, a path to dilution of that excitement and energy? If you have to go on labouring day after day to paint huge surfaces, do you run out of steam? Of course, it is not always the case by any means — think of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, when Michelangelo laboured day after day in the most difficult of physical positions and conditions, and yet he achieved a power and impact of work that reverberates for every viewer.

Nonetheless, not every artist is a Michelangelo. And in the case of Richard Diebenkorn, I personally found that all his large canvases began to lack intensity. My reaction to these works was unexpectedly reinforced by three small paintings hung amongst the Ocean Park canvases.

They were three equally abstract works, painted on small cigar box covers. He used the cigar box cover paintings as gifts to friends, apparently, and my feeling was that these were the true gems in the exhibition. They were the perfect epitome of "small is beautiful". AsSarah C. Bancroft, curator of one Diebenkorn museum exhibition observes in the catalogue essay, they “capture one’s attention from across the room and command an expanse of wall space disproportionate to their actual size.”

Richard Diebenkorn, Cigar Box Lid #4, 1976. Oil on wood, 8-3⁄8 x 7-1⁄8". The Grant Family Collection. © The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn.

Lyrical, free, certainly intense, but utterly lovely - they just sang. The more one explores the work Diebenkorn did in this small format, on cigar box lids, the more delightful and intimate the body of work becomes. Perhaps Diebenkorn felt liberated in this small format - he was not constrained by acres of canvas, nor the demands of gallery settings and collectors demanding impressive pieces. He could just create small delights that are intimate in scale, where his true sense of colour and the fitness of abstraction could be married to an acute sense of human celebration of life.

Richard Diebenkorn, Cigar Box Lid #6, oil on wood, 1979

As Diebenkorn himself observed, "The idea is to get everything right — it’s not just color or form or space or line — it’s everything all at once." He certainly achieved that for me in the cigar box lid paintings.

The three large rooms of the Royal Academy's Diebenkorn exhibition were distilled down to these three small pieces, for me. In a funny way, they helped me feel more reassured about my own art - my frequent choice of small format in metalpoint drawings was strangely validated. I was grateful to Diebenkorn for that, but most of all, for three paintings that still sing to me weeks after seeing them.

Tiny Images, Vast Scenes / March 30, 2015 by Jeannine Cook

Peder Balke is not the name of an artist that readily springs to mind, yet he is now considered the pre-eminent Norwegian artist of the 19th century. His landscapes and especially seascapes, highly unusual in their techniques, are now justly celebrated. I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of his paintings at the National Gallery, having seen a smaller one of his work in the same rooms four years ago. Balke lived from 1804-1887, started out as a full-time painter and then had to turn to other ways of earning his living. Nonetheless, he continued to paint, for his own pleasure, experimenting and using paints in ways that heralded modern expressionism. He travelled to the North Cape in Norway, an area of dramatic coastlines and radiantly strange light of the Arctic Circle. These scenes continued to influence him many years later. He did not always paint specific scenes, but used the moods and impressions of nature, often in almost abstract fashion, to convey the majesty, mystery, solitude and power of the natural world.

The Old Bridge, Oil on panel, Peder Balke

Seascape c. 1860, oil on canvas mounted on panel, Peder Balke

While the larger paintings on display in the National Gallery exhibition were impressive, especially the highly atmospheric ones of Northern scenes, done in the 1870s, the ones that fascinate me are the tiny ones. They pack a punch, almost in a visceral way.

Stormy Sea, oil on cardboard, Peder Balke (Image courtesy of Drammens Museum)

They are indeed small, mostly blacks and white, seascapes and some landscapes of glaciers or waterfalls, often almost abstracts. They are not small, however, when it comes to impact. Their effect is perhaps more powerful than that of many of the larger paintings he did. Perhaps my love of monochromatic works leads me to them, but to me, they are stunning in their big voices coming from very small rectangles of oil on cardboard or oil on board.

Norther Lights over Coastal Landscape, c. 1870, oil on panel, Peder Balke

Sun breaking through the Clouds at Vardohus, 1860-1870s, oil on panel, Private Collection

I wonder if other people find them as arresting as I do?