Mountain and Pasture, a new drawing

I finished this charcoal drawing today, another one in my current Iceland series. When we passed this mountain, on the way out of Reykjavik toward Thingvellir, we simply had to stop the car and get out to take photographs. The home of the great Icelandic author, Haldor Laxness, is nearby, too.

It was only when we looked much closer that we realized there were sheep in the pastures -- just recently down in the valley from their summer grazing much higher up.

You can view a slideshow of the drawing in process at my site on Flickr.

 

Comments

[NT]

This seems masterful to me! Wonderful!

[Dave]

Stunning. And I always think of sheep in this way, as land lice.

[Miguel]

What an extraordinary drawing, Beth. You don't get the scale of it until you see the little white things at the bottom.

[mike]

Wow...the longer I look, the more I like it.

[-s]

Yes, the links between your work and the later work of Emily Carr are very strong in this drawing. Forground and background, land and figures, are integrated into one and the massing lines and forms connote the massing land and the smallness of human presence within it.

[marly youmans]

Have already told you how much I like this--so I'll just tell you one more time. I very much like the subject matter you have found in Iceland. Your soul-mate in the landscape realm. I suppose you'll have to go back, won't you?

[Natalie]

As I've already said, fabulous drawing, Beth. The tones are beautiful and that splintered, craggy, sweeping form in the middle, like bleached driftwood. Also make me think of William Blake somehow.

[Marja-Leena]

Powerful! I love the sense of movement in the shapes and lines, as if that mountain side is flowing down, with a rupture in the middle. Really captures that ancient tectonic region.

[marly youmans]

Natalie's comment is very interesting--I think Blake is a very apt linkage. Something like "Elohim Creating Adam," say, where one figures swoops down onto the inanimate one... The great sweep and muscularity and force and largeness of the landscape does indeed seem Blakean--the insistence on a kind of primal force. More!

[Clive Hicks-Jenkins]

A fine drawing Beth. Lot's of energy moving it. If I may say so, this blog has seen your drawing skills progress in leaps and bounds. The tentative has given way to the sure and the joyful.