the cassandra pages

Packing for Painting

For the first time in nearly four years, we're planning to go on a significant trip abroad, and I hope to do quite a lot of sketching. This is going to be a carry-on-luggage-only journey, so whatever I take has to be light and compact, including my bag of art supplies. As of the end of yesterday (which included a quick trip to the art supply store to buy two tubes of watercolor paint), I think I've got it all sorted.

The big decision was to take my larger travel palette rather than the tiny one shown in the top picture. This one holds 24 half-pans of color rather than twelve, has a considerably larger mixing area, and I can also fit several travel brushes into it, but it's still quite compact at about 6 x 4 inches. Today I worked on cleaning it up, refilling the color wells, shifting the arrangement of colors, and substituting a few new ones, mainly Potter's Pink, which I haven't used before, and a pre-mixed well of cool grey. Both of those will function as neutrals, be good mixers with other colors, and save time in the painting process. As usual, I painted a lot of swatches to make sure the pigments chosen are what i really need -- for instance, the greenish-grey swatches at bottom right above are tests for the silvery grey-green of olive leaves...a hint as to where we're going.

I'll be taking a new Stillman&Birn Gamma sketchbook slightly smaller than my usual landscape-format 7" x 10" book. This one is 6" x 8", with a vertical spiral binding, but I will most likely turn the pages and work horizontally. The painting at the top of this post is the first page in the new sketchbook. It seems like the format will be fine, and the paper is what I like best and am used to for both ink drawing and watercolor sketching. Sometimes I also take a watercolor block of high-quality paper but decided to buy one there if needed. I always go with great intentions to draw or paint every day, but when traveling it's not always possible to take the time. We'll see how it goes; I'm going to be as prepared, and as relaxed, about it as possible.

For tools, I've whittled things down to the bare essentials because pens tend to weight quite a bit. I'll be taking a mechanical pencil and an HB Dixon Ticonderoga, two Grumbacher charcoal pencils (hard and medium) and a tiny, light sharpener that works for two sizes (it's actually a makeup pencil sharpener that I got at Sephora.) For pens, I'm packing my Sailor fude-nib pen filled with my favorite Noodler's ink color, "El Lawrence", (thank you, Pohangina Pete), which is an olive green-grey; I have a small bottle of extra ink in the bag. For this I used an empty bottle of eye drops; the screw top is bullet-proof and I've never had trouble with it. I will probably also take a Faber-Castell medium fude-nib marker, a white gel pen, and a water brush. The other brushes in my kit are recent acquisitions that I think will work really well: it's a set of Princeton travel brushes, sizes 10, 8, 6 and 4 of which I will only take the larger sizes, plus a very small brush for details. They're synthetic sable, with handles that double as holders when the point-end is reversed. They'll be fine for this purpose and if they get messed up, it's not a loss of hundreds of dollars as sable brushes would be.

Add to that a small white eraser, some pieces of microfiber dishtowels (Trader Joe's) that are highly absorbent, washable substitutes for paper towels for wiping brushes and regulating the water/pigment load, and a small sea sponge, and the kit is complete. 

All of this will go into the plastic, see-through zip-top bag shown above (this one's from the Container Store; you can find similar bags online), which fits easily into my "personal item" bag rather than the carry-on, so that I can sketch in the airport or during the flight.

I'm excited! And anxious to start using the new set-up.

Learning from John Singer Sargent

I've done very little copying in my art career, but whenever I've taken the time to try, it's been instructive and helpful. Lately I've wanted to make some new progress with watercolor, which for me is the most challenging of all media, and where better to turn than to the great master, John Singer Sargent.

Sargent's watercolors have always been the pinnacle for me. After seeing a big show of his paintings in Brooklyn in 2013, curated jointly by the Boston MFA and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, I became even more impressed by his brilliance, and curious about his technique. Since then I've studied reproductions and, especially, enlarged details, read articles about his methods, and tried out some of his techniques, like the use of wax resists. Until this week, though, ten years later, I'd never actually tried to copy one of his paintings. I learned so much that I will probably do more of it, to try to understand the steps through which he's planning and building the layers of the painting, since this is crucial to good watercolor painting. I'm less concerned about studying his draughtsmanship, which is incredible, or his sense of composition. The biggest question for me is, "how does he get the paint down on the paper with such luminosity and brilliance?"

One answer to that is speed. Observers at the time concurred that Sargent worked amazingly fast, with complete confidence. He was such a master of drawing what he saw, and of the human body in particular, that this aspect of picture-making -- which slows most of us down cosiderably, and often causes us to fuss over details -- was not an obstacle for him in the least. Often, his watercolors include just the merest indication of pencil lines, just enough to place the elements relative to each other. At other times, such as in architectural studies, he drew considerable detail before painting. My guess is that Sargent painted this piece in half an hour or less.

Another answer is the way he used his pigments. He knew exactly which were appropriate for the subjects and type of painting he had chosen, and used the same ones repeatedly. He knew everything about how they'd behave in water and in mixtures with one another. In this way he was able to achieve brilliance, intensity, and luminosity, and to avoid the muddiness that comes from overmixing, or inappropriate choices of pigment to mix or layer. He also often used a quite limited palette, which contributed to being able to work quickly.

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To begin my copy, I drew the figure of the girl lightly and without detail, indicating her clothing and figure, placement of the head and features, and the rough placement of shadows. Then I wet the sheet with a wide brush, leaving the figure intact, and put in one layer of background in very wet yellow ochre, allowing the paint to run, and adding subseqent pigment mixed with a little ultramarine blue -- these were the pigments that Sargent probably used, and I think he painted this entire piece using just those two, plus a little warm brown and/or sienna. (Toward the end I also added a little Pyrrol orange - a modern pigment - in order to get the warm shadows such as appear in the reproduction.) I didn't fuss too much over the background and moved on to the figure as soon as the background was dry enough; the dark shadows beside the skirt were painted later. Sargent has at least three passes in his background; it was hard for me to tell when in the process he painted those except that the earlier layers were pretty dry when he did.

My version: bottom of the skirt - this is probably the best part of my painting!

There are no areas surrounding the figure where the background bleeds a lot, but in some places --like the hair -- the edges are quite soft. Controlling the wetness of the paper and knowing when to add pigment, and how wet to make it, are the great challenges of watercolor. The type of paper also makes a huge difference. I was painting on 140-pound cold-pressed paper; Sargent's piece was on white wove paper, smoother than mine, and slightly larger. In any case, all of my edges ended up being harder than his, and my background lacked the subtle control of his original. I also had some trouble with the drawing of the arm and hands, and adjusted them after taking the first photo at the top of this page; the horizontal arm is still a little too low and slightly too angled, but perfect accuracy was not my goal so I won't be too hard on myself for that! I also softened the facial shadows and lightened the entire face.

My version, with adjusted left arm and softened. lightened face.

While making this copy, it was astonishing to enter Sargent's mind a little bit as I observed his decisions: how to abbreviate the drawing of the clasped hands; which shadows on the blouse should be warm grey, and which cool; how much detail to include in the face; how to show the volume of the skirt, and finally, what finishing touches to add. There is blue gouache (opaque watercolor) on the cap and in a few places on the blouse -- he must have added this because its reflective property is different, because the gouche "sits up" on the paper surface unlike the watercolor which tends to sink in more. I was surprised how much it made the painting come alive when I did the same.

So that was my first foray into copying this master watercolorist -- I'm pleased with what I learned and think it was time well spent. This was an early work of his; time to take a close look at some of his later pieces which are brighter and lighter, and use brilliant color.

 

Willow and Stream

Willow and Stream near Otselic, New York. Watercolor, gouache, with touches of charcoal pencil. 6" x 6". May 30, 2023.

Last week we were in central New York for a visit to the lake, and, because Memorial Day was near, we also visited the graves of my parents, maternal grandparents, and great aunt -- I'll write another post about that soon. One afternoon we drove over the hills to the cemetery in South Otselic, NY where many of my ancestors are buried. Unlike the winter landscapes that had preoccupied me since January, the whole world had become green, lush, and leafy. It wasn't a particularly pretty day, there were no interesting clouds, the sun was right overhead, and the green felt relentless. But I stopped and took a few pictures anyway, and a few days ago, back in Montreal, started working with one of them.

Here it is, and it's pretty boring! I stared at the photograph for a long time, wondering what I could possibly do with it, and trying to remember what had felt compelling enough about the scene to ask J. to stop the car. The answer is in the title of this post -- the willows and the stream - but I didn't know how to make a picture from this: how to make it interesting, when there was so little color or even obvious, strong compositional shapes. So I decided to begin with drawing, and a few hours later, this was the result:

As you can see, the drawing is cropped in from both sides to focus more on the willows and downplay the field. It was fun to draw a verdant landscape instead of the snow-covered ones and I was surprised that it worked this well in charcoal, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with the composition. When preparing a set of details to post on Instagram, I had cropped into the image and saw that a much closer view was better. In the original, the stream forms a strong diagonal but it also divides the picture into two more-or-less equal triangles, giving the grassy foreground too much prominence compared to what had first attracted me: the shapes and growth pattern of the willows overhanging the stream, with the brightness leafiness above, and the dark, mysterious area where the willow overhangs the bank of the stream.

When cropped, that's much more what we see.

Then the question was how to translate this into color. The next day, I took out my watercolors to make a sketch, and ended up struggling with it for quite a long while, trying to keep it loose and interpret the scene with vigorous brushstrokes and beautiful color that wasn't necessarily in either the original landscape or photograph. 

The tree branches here are dark blue and brighter blue, not black or brown, and the blue is echoed in the grassy areas and the stream, contrasting with the bright yellow-greens of the sunstruck leaves. But it wasn't until I made the stream itself brown, and added the few strokes of orange, that the picture began to sing at all.

By then I had overworked the dark area of low branches at the left front, so I went in with just a little bit of opaque watercolor to add some leaves, and a few strokes of white charcoal pencil to highlight the tops of some branches and bring them forward. Then, fortunately, I forced myself to quit before messing around with it any further!

I'll probably do another version of this scene in a different medium, maybe pastel, maybe oil or acrylic, before letting it go. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

 

At the Musée des Beaux-Arts

Our weather has been really grim this week, adding to the feeling of cooped-up restlessness that is always part of this long run-up to real spring in the north. Yesterday afternoon I couldn't stand it any longer, and went out into the cold rain and wind to take the metro downtown, and then walk up to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, my sketchbook and drawing supplies in my bag.

We became members of the museum again a few months ago, for the first time since the pandemic began, but we've only visited once since. Yesterday, I was hoping to see some drawings, but there didn't seem to be much of any on display - I think I'll contact the curators and ask if it's possible to see anything from the collection. So instead I took a close look at the permanent collection of European art. There is a room of impressionists that’s not bad: an early Cezanne landscape, several Pissarros and Sisleys, a couple of large landscapes by Armand Guillaumin that I liked quite a lot. The 20^th century contemporary art collection is very thin and not to my taste. There's a large canvas by Elaine deKooning, and an oil sketch of five figures by Barbara Hepworth that I liked a lot; one painting by Matisse. Above, there's an entire floor of French Baroque/Rococo-- I can't stand that period so I skipped it -- and on the next level, some excellent Dutch paintings, among them two landscapes by Jacob von Ruisdael, a number of still lives, works by Breugel the Younger, and a beautiful Rembrandt portrait.

Detail from Portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1530, oil on wood.

On the top, when I entered the Renaissance galleries, I finally felt my whole body relax. There is no single spectacular piece, but in the darkened rooms, with some stained glass and some good sculptures, and the brilliant carmines and blues and greens in the paintings, I was quickly held in the quiet ambience of the age. I had never been to these galleries before, or maybe they have changed. After looking around carefully, and spending time with a Memling portrait of a young man, and a Holbein portrait of Erasmus in a fur-trimmed robe, holding a book, I did a couple of drawings of early sculptures that particularly spoke to me.

 

If I hadn’t been tired of standing when I finished, I would have also drawn a German wood carving, titled, “Virgin of the Annunciation”, that I found beautiful in her attitude of reflection as she looks away from her book at something that has entered her room. I will go back and do that.

On the other side of the street, connected by an underground passageway, a different building houses the Canadian collection, as well as galleries with antiquities and art from other parts of the world. I'm more familiar with those and will go there to draw sometime soon. 

In two of the rooms, wooden sketching benches had been positioned near large sculptures, with sheets of newsprint clipped to an easel attached to the seat. But there were too many visitors in those rooms for me to feel comfortable using one of those benches -- you'd feel like a live part of the display. Off to the side in the dark Renaissance rooms, no one bothered me. If they looked over my shoulder I didn't notice, and they quickly moved on.

Drawing in museums isn't something I've done very much - I really started doing that in Athens, more than three years ago, and haven't been in similar spaces much at all since then. When traveling, I always feel like time is at a premium and the priority in a museum is to see more of what is being shown. In one's home town, that's obviously not the case! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before now; it was good for me.

Color and Light

We recently returned to Montreal after a week in central New York. In Montreal, there was a terrible ice storm last Wednesday, with power outages that lasted days for many people, and devastating damage to the city's trees, especially in the parks. Friends sent us pictures and their own accounts, and while our building was without power for a long time, and then again last night, we clearly missed the worst of it. I also missed the observations of Holy Week at the cathedral for the first time in years, but we got back in time for Easter. Renewal, warmth, color, and sunlight are exactly what everyone needs -- myself included.

300 miles to the south, spring was already in the process of arriving, and on our last evening there, I got out my watercolors and painted this field that we had seen a few hours earlier in the late afternoon light. The luminous gold only lasted for a few minutes on this cut cornfield and the hill beyond, but it was breathtaking enough that I had cried "Stop the car!" and rushed out into the muddy road with my camera.

It did me a huge amount of good to be out in the countryside for a while after this long urban winter. We saw a nesting bald eagle, a flock of mergansers on the recently-unfrozen lake; rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, and wild turkeys; Canada geese, herons, robins, cardinals, and dark-eyed juncos...and someone -- maybe our weasel -- had generously left its scat on our front porch, full of hair and tiny bones. The stiff, bright green and purple noses of skunk cabbage had already poked through the water in the swamp, and spring peepers sang in full chorus even during daylight hours. No leaves showed on any trees or shrubs yet, just on one honeysuckle that faced the southern light, but there were pussy willows in the swamp, one of my mother's yellow crocuses was in bloom, and the woods felt tremulous, as if you could actually feel the pent-up power of all those tightly-furled leaves inside the millions of buds, ready to burst forth.

At the same time, I've been finishing my series of winter snowscapes in charcoal. There was still a lot of snow in the Adirondacks, and I was able to take reference pictures for a few more drawings, and stay within that much colder frame of mind while I was working on them. I'm also beginning an essay to accompany this series of drawings, about the central New York landscape and why it is under my skin. But I can feel my heart gravitating toward color and light, and coming back home to Easter only reinforced that sense of new beginnings, and new life.

We attended the Great Vigil of Easter at the cathedral on Saturday night. It begins with a fire in the courtyard, which is then carried into the dark church via the lighted Pascal candle, from which everyone's small tapers are lit, and we sit together in that near-darkness while the foundational stories of the Hebrew scriptures are read and music is sung; finally the dry bones of Ezekiel are brought to life, and we move to the resurrection story, the organ peals forth, bells ring, the lights go on and the candles are extinguished, and we find ourselves in a church bedecked with flowers and spring color. Pagan in some ways; ironic in a city ravaged by an ice storm, with so many families still in darkness and cold -- and utterly welcome to my own tired spirit. 

My other cathedral this year was this circle of hemlock trees on a small ridge near the lake. I had gone there on Good Friday morning, climbing up onto the ridge to stand under the trees, listening to the wind, the invisible amphibious chorus, the calls of nesting geese on the pond beyond, and let the peace of that place, along with many memories, permeate my body and heart.

Inspiration and Perspiration

I can feel that I'm starting to be ready to wrap up this series of winter drawings, at least for this year. There are two or three others I'd like to do if I can. But this one beckoned persistently, and because I knew it would be a real challenge, I decided I'd better go for it while I still felt inspired.

On the day I saw this scene, we had been fortunate enough to drive through the Adirondacks just after a heavy snowstorm that had thickly coated every single branch of every tree -- the atmospheric conditions must have been very particular. Since the snowfall, there had been no wind, and we were nearly alone on the roads, so it felt like a sort of suspended animation. We left the main road at some point and drove up through deep woods on a narrow dirt road to its top, and then back down into a hollow where there was a stream. The road was icy, and we figured we'd better turn around while we could. Jonathan got out to take a picture of the water, but on the other side of the road, long ago, someone had made a semi-circular clearing, now ringed by this group of trees, completely covered with thick fresh snow: mostly spruces and larches with lacy branches, standing heroically like characters in a play, or guardians of the woods behind them, flanked by a chorus of bare deciduous trees raising their white arms and fingers. No wind blew, no birds sang or hopped from branch to branch to cause cascades of snow -- just the utter stillness of deep midwinter woods on an extraordinary day.

At the time I hadn't planned to do any drawings, but as this series progressed, I kept coming back to that semi-circle of trees, and felt I needed to try.

The complex nature of this forest scene required a preliminary sketch (above). The overall approach was too simplistic and too contrast-y, but I was just trying out different approaches. I wasn't too happy with the spruce tree, but liked the larch on the right, and felt that the handling of the trees in the background would probably work. So then it was a question of beginning again for real, and summoning the patience for what I knew would be a long, challenging effort.

In most of the drawings in the series, I've been able to work back and forth across the whole scene, or from top to bottom in a logical way. But here, I couldn't do that, because there was so much going on that I kept losing track of where I was. So I developed the picture in vertical slices, worrying all the time that I wouldn't be able to integrate the entire drawing across the picture plane. It was complicated, eye-fatiguing, and seemed like it took forever -- I worked on it off and on for three days.

Then, once I was almost done, I had to work quite a bit on the picture as a whole to make the different areas relate to each other, and bring the overall greyscale into harmony. There are some things I'd do differently if I were to do it over (that's not going to happen!) but in general I'm pretty happy with the final result.

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This process made me think a lot about what happens when inspiration is hard to hold onto -- how do we keep going toward our original goal when things get tough? It's so easy, and tempting, to give up at that point. Part of being a professional artist, designer, writer -- or pretty much any other artform -- is learning how to stick with a project, no matter how difficult it is or how many obstacles come up, and bring about a satisfactory conclusion. If the client has hired you, then that is your part of the contract. Likewise, if the public has bought a ticket to the concert, there is an expectation of excellence.

But for the professional, this also creates a difficulty. When is the result "good enough," and when is it extraordinary? Because most of us know, deep down, that there is a difference. In music, as in all the arts -- and in sports, for that matter -- peak performances do not happen every day. The public may not know, because technical virtuosity may be there, just as facility in drawing or painting may be there, and the public tends to recognize and reward virtuosity. But technical brilliance alone doesn't create an inspired performance or a truly special work of art; it is not the same as artistry that somehow, intangibly, conveys what is going on in the heart and mind of the artist and conveys that to the audience in a truly moving and memorable way. For that matter, the artist often doesn't know why a particular performance felt different, or why a particular painting or drawing or poem happened as it did: you can't "will" it to happen. The hours and hours of practice and preparation that add up to technical facility are the means to the end, but they are not the end in themselves.

There are an awful lot of professionals who do coast along on a combination of technique, repetition of what has been praised or popular, and doing work that is "good enough." Pushing yourself to do better, to continually grow, requires taking risks -- and that means some of the time you're going to fall short or fail. It also means once in a while, maybe not often at all, you're going to do something that confirms why you began this journey in the first place.

I'm not saying that this drawing is extraordinary in any way, just that it was more challenging than the others I've done so far, and required digging deeper into myself to keep going and pull out a result that felt satisfying -- it asked more of me. Looking back on the last two months of work, I can see that I've learned a lot.

I always pay attention when I feel my inspiration running thin. Perspiration - pushing through to a good result - can only take you so far. The poet Osip Mandelstam once made the enigmatic comment that he always knew when he was getting close to the end of a cycle of poems when he started writing about the stars. He had discovered a clue in his own work. I don't have that; I just have a feeling that I'm not quite there on the razor's edge, the way it was when inspiration first hit and the first works were coming. But concentration and persistence can bring you back to a place where inspiration once again takes over: that's the intangible lesson of this drawing, and maybe of those moments standing in the circle of snow-covered trees.

Winter Mysteries

If there is an ultra-typical view of central New York that feels like it embodies the sense of "home" to me, it's this sort of scene: pastures bordered by hedgerows, wooded hilltops, tall deciduous trees and scrubby brush, all arranged in a zigzagging patchwork that carries the eye up and down and across the rolling hills. It's beautiful in every season, but you can see the shape of the land better in the winter, when the contrast is greatest between the fields and the trees; in the summer, pretty much everything is green, or shades of green, brown, and yellow. After this winter's deep dive into the landscape, I'm sure I will be making paintings or doing pastels in the more colorful seasons too, but I'm learning a lot about looking and about what has always attracted my own eye, attention, and heart to this particular type of terrain and its ecology. 

The picture at the top of this post was done after the one below. These are two views of the same range of hills, north of Hamilton, NY, as you're heading toward Rt 20. 

The top picture took a quite a bit of time - an hour or two -- but the bottom one was a deliberately fast 13-minute sketch. In the video below, you can see the whole sketching process condensed to a minute and a half, which I find both amusing and also mystifying; I've watched it a number of times and still can't figure out how the brain and eye, intellect and intuition actually do this. There's a lot about the arts, as well as many other human endeavors, that will always remain mysterious to me, and beyond the realm of what we "learn" to do or can explain. 

For instance, this weekend we watched Mikaela Shiffrin break Ingmar Stenmark's record for world cup skiing victories -- a record many thought would never fall. The qualities that set her apart are vastly more than flawless technique and great physical conditioning; there's her uncanny feeling for the snow in a wide range of conditions, her ability to "see" the course in her mind, and then ski it tighter, faster, and more perfectly than anyone else, and the whole constellation of mental and emotional mastery that's necessary to win so consistently over a period of years. My husband was a ski racer in his youth, and we both skied a lot in our 30s and 40s; he was incredibly good and taught me a lot about the sport, while I became a rather foolhardy advanced intermediate. We stopped, eventually, after some injuries that threatened to become chronic problems as we aged -- and also because skiing with people with cell phones began to take away the solitude and quiet we loved in that other world of the mountains. But those long, cold, sunny, foggy, snowy days remain etched in my mind, and in my dreams I am sometimes still skiing -- and it still feels fantastic.

I never understood exactly how the mind and body managed to coordinate themselves in order to allow this. You learn "how", but then there is a kind of letting go, where you aren't thinking about it in the same analytical way all the time. For me, that was always a tenuous balance, because I didn't grow up on skis, and I was never that good at it, but under optimum conditions, sometimes I could experience the freedom. The gulf between me and a top racer like Schiffrin is, well, about as big as the distance from here to Switzerland, and yet I can appreciate what the human body is capable of doing, both for someone like me who grew up among little un-skied hills like these, to learn to ski on much bigger ones, and for the people at the top of the sport -- or music, or art, or dance, or many other disciplines. It's nothing short of amazing. The thing is, we all do many things every single day that are an astounding combination of learned and intuitive actions. We seldom stop to think about them, but we should marvel at ourselves now and then, for simply being able to read, brush our teeth, cook an egg. It is not insignificant at all.

Old Apple Trees

 

The latest in my series of winter charcoal drawings of upstate and central New York is this one, of a pair of old trees in a field - probably apple trees, I'm thinking. They touch something in me; perhaps it's the way they are still growing in spite of losing limbs and, in the case of one, practically its entire original trunk. Maybe it's because they look like a pair. But it's also because finding old trees like this feels typical of such a place, where people have been farming for a long time. Perhaps there was once a homestead nearby. I like the way these trees, with their individual personalities, stand in the foreground, set off by the indistinct woods in the little gully behind the hills; it makes me want to walk there, climb up the hill behind, see if there's a stream. I'm sure deer like these trees too, and can be found beneath them in the fall, eating apples.

It's difficult to get good photos or scans of these drawings; even when I work on them in Photoshop, I find that favoring the bright white of the snow means losing a lot of detail and grey tones in the trees, but retaining those tones means the snow is too dark. I've got a project in mind for this series, so I need to solve that technical problem, no doubt with some help from my partner who knows all about black-and-white reproduction.

But in real life, I can see that progress has been made. I pinned all the drawings up on my studio wall - four of them are still at the lake -- and was pleased to see how they talk to each other, and how together they start to add up to something more interesting than the individual drawings. That's encouraging.

We're having more snow here in Montreal today, with another storm coming this weekend. I figure I have just this current month to continue in a winter frame of mind, so I need to keep at these. There are nine so far, including two that are sketches, and I'd like to have at least twelve to choose from, better yet fifteen, by the time spring can be felt in the air, and the snow begins to recede at last. One of the drawings I plan to do is of the same field you can see in the summer painting, standing on the floor.

 

Drawing Conifers

 

Click on "PLAY" arrow, then the box in lower right to view full-screen.

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Drawing conifers is different from drawing deciduous trees, and it's an example of where "what we think we know" can get in the way of "what we're actually seeing". We all have a kind of "idea" of what an evergreen tree looks like -- most simplistically, think of a kid's drawing of a Christmas tree -- but most of them don't actually look like that. Not only is the overall shape and arrangement of branches difficult to capture, it's easy to make evergreen trees look very flat, like paper cutouts, because it's hard to see and depict the branches that come toward us and are essentially foreshortened. We don't see bare deciduous trees that way: what we see is a silhouette of the branches against the background or sky, which is easier to understand and capture in a drawing, even if the arrangement of branches is complex. But unless you are drawing an isolated evergreen tree in detail, you really don't need to struggle with this problem, and there are ways to make it easier to convey the feeling of a forest of conifers, or a mixed forest, without getting bogged down in details.

Detail of yesterday's drawing

In the video demonstration, I'm showing how I approached the conifer forest in the drawing posted yesterday, by making a new drawing of just the background right section, and explaining the process as I go along. Obviously this isn't aimed at beginners, because it's a response to a comment by someone with experience who had a specific question, but I hope you'll find it interesting to watch anyway. I don't know about you, but I have a fascination with how-to videos, especially when the subject is art, or cooking, sewing, ceramics, or other creative disciplines, where we start with nothing and end up with a finished "something", often something quite beautiful. (I've also been known to get fascinated by hair styling videos.) So I have to make sure I don't go down the famously time-draining Instagram rabbit-hole.

So here's where you come in, even if you have no artistic ambition! I'm using these videos as a way to work out how to do the photography, the narration, the video editing, the titles -- all of that. J. helped me with the camera mount, so this time the drawing paper is straight and we're looking down on it directly and squarely, which should be a lot easier for you as the viewer. I'm looking for feedback, so please let me know what works for you. I'd like to know if you'd prefer to have some sections fast-forwarded or if you like seeing the whole process as it is shown here: does the video bog down, or is the pace OK? (You can always grab the red circle on the leading edge of the video time-indication line, and drag it forward to the right.) Also, I am referring to a photograph as I work - would it help to see it again from time to time in the course of the video? What sorts of instructional videos would interest you the most? I will be doing an entry-level video soon, talking about drawing media and tools.

Thanks very much for your input!

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Note: we are dealing with the illness and possible end-of-life of our beloved 14-year-old cat, Manon. Making this video was part of how I distracted myself and tried to look forward this past week. I know many of you have been through this before, as we have -- it's never easy. I find myself pretty much unable to write about her, but wanted to share this news with you.

 

 

A Winter Stream in the Adirondacks

My weekend project was this charcoal drawing of a stream near Lake Piseco, in the southern Adirondacks. We had stopped by a culvert in the road where the stream passed underneath it, and I got out and took some photographs in both directions; that was late January and the stream was flowing strongly -- which seemed unusual for that time of year, no doubt a consequence of the warming climate. Lake Piseco is a big body of water, and normally is a haven for ice fishing, but we saw very few ice fishing shanties out on the ice this year.

There were lots of challenging aspects to this drawing, from depicting the conifer forest in the background, ringed by shorter bare shrubs, to the mounded snow and trees reflecting in the flowing water. I simplified the scene from what it actually looked like, where there was snow on every branch, and the brush and twigs coming out of the snow seemed much more complicated and detailed. This little 38-second time-lapse shows how the drawing evolved:

Over the past couple of days I made a short demo video just about drawing the conifers in the background, in response to a request made on the previous video post -- I'll post that tomorrow or the next day.