Laurelines

A pause for pencil

In a complicated world, experienced by a complicated mind (mine, to wit), it is well from time to time to simplify. What could be simpler than pencil on paper? And it's so much fun, the pencil. Here are colored pencils in action at the Audubon Gallery at the North Carolina Museum of Art. I usually find taxidermy distressing and depressing, but the birds at NCMA are lovely. Their spirit remains.

I commend to you, in addition to the Audubon Gallery at NCMA, the Iris restaurant where, along with bright and tasty food and polite fellow diners, you get to rub shoulders with one of Patrick Dougherty's sublime site-specific branch and twig wall sculptures. Pencil with a bit of added wash happened here.

Why do I like blue pencil so much? I have no idea, but there we are. At a workshop I went to last weekend, I blue penciled my fellow attendees. And on blue-lined paper, too. I sense a theme evolving here.

and

On the other hand, we have non-blue pencils and here is one very dandy example ... I used a multi-colored, swirled-together leaded pencil for a quick drawing I made of my daughter Kate on her birthday. Those multi-colored pencils are delightful... they're rainbows in pencil form.

And here's a nude guy from a figure drawing session I went to,  drawn on 18" x 24" paper. Brown pencil here, I don't remember which kind.

People and countries behave badly often, but pencils... they're low-key, they're steady, they're workhorses. On the cusp of July as we are, with its heat and its relative quiet (Northern Hemispherically speaking) and in the midst of global troubles, it's worthwhile to consider pausing with a pencil or two. That's what I'm doing.

My birthday celebration with Kate: at the museum, reading, and sketches

When my firstborn child, my daughter Kate, was very young, I started reading to her and taking her to libraries and art museums. In fact, I started reading to her before she was six months old. I'd sit her on my lap and we'd take flight... off to the world of Good Night Moon, Beatrix Potter, Mother Goose, Eric Carle, Arnold Lobel, Kate Greenaway, A Child's Garden of Verses, and many, many more. We never looked back.

We visited London often, and also Edinburgh, where she was born. We lived in London, in fact, during her kindergarten year. And we went to art museums there, her first ones, and then everywhere we went, all the time. 

Now, Kate has her own children---two little boys---and she reads to them and she and her husband take them to museums and to libraries.

And she herself still reads. In fact, she reads more than any person I know, including me, and that is saying a lot in the world we live in. And she goes to art museums. Often. As much as possible. Everywhere.

Earlier this month, it was my birthday. We celebrated it together, at the art museum, at a library.  Of course, we did. Looking, reading, talking... mother and daughter.

 

In this sketch I made of Kate reading, she is exactly the age I am in the photo above.

As she read, I also sketched the scene behind her.

It was a wonderful birthday.

In the chilly dusk, we walked through a park, and to one of my favorite restaurants for an early dinner. Then it was home for each of us... her to her two little boys and husband, me to my husband and our dog. A day to remember, a day with a long and sweet history behind it.

Sketching in museums

I'm leading a sketching session at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University this weekend, as I've mentioned. I've been sketching in museums for a very long time. This occasion at Duke prompts me to think about what it is *to draw this way and why it is we do it.

Sketching at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges.

Sketching is about connecting, whether the subject is a beloved 15 month-old child, an Alpine peak in Italy, or a monkfish on a slab at the Bergen fish market.

I like the word 'cathect' to express what we do when we draw: verb tr.: To invest mental or emotional energy in an idea, object, or person.

When we are lucky, the energy runs both ways. We become a conduit for the emotional energy emanating, on its own, from the Other.

Sketching in museums is a perfect opportunity for this kind of interconnection. As we draw, we participate, in varying degrees, in the process of creation of another's work.

 The varying degrees part is key. Sometimes when we sketch a painting or sculpture, we feel as if our hands and heart are one with the original artist's hands and heart.

 Sometimes, we attempt to get at the heart of the artist's creation through close observation and faithful rendering (remember, my rendering is always on the loose side!) :

At other times, we are simply making gestures in the general direction and spirit of the work in question.

All are worthwhile stops on the continuum of interconnection.

As with writing, we often don't know what we think about something until we draw it. And the process of drawing can be revelatory in ways other than intellectual.

Recently at the Nasher, I drew some pieces by Joan Miro.

His creaturely figures manifested an intense spirituality, much more so than the 15th-century German bust of Christ I also drew that day. I might have expected the reverse, but the Christ figure was stolid and very human--- which may have been what the artist intended to convey, after all. The Miros were eloquent and transcendent, for all their apparent fragility.

 

There are other things to say about sketching in museums. We could talk about drawing materials allowed in museums and ways to expand that often limited vocabulary. We could talk about sketching certain kinds of work for consolation and personal affirmation. For example, I love to sketch sculptures of the Buddha and bodhisattvas when I need a tranquility boost.

 If you have any experiences or observations you would like to share on these subjects, please do comment!

 *Here I'm not referring to the practice of copying Old Masters in museums,  a mainstay of past academic art training, but something more personal and most often less rigorous

Sketching at the North Carolina Museum of Art

I'm still madly and happily painting volcanoes, but I miss frequent sketching. My husband and I went to the North Carolina Museum of Art this past weekend to remedy the situation. Here is what resulted: 

This polychrome 18th century German, 'Adoring Angel,' calls to me. I've sketched this before,

but wanted to connect to the angel again.

Another view:

On a (very) different plane, here is a self-portrait:

and a vignette from the African Gallery:

The second batch of volcanoes should be ready to share soon. I can't rush the process, much as I wish I could.