This post originally appears on The Smart Creative.
Iām back in the studio after a whirlwind start to the Summer. Art fairs and exhibitions, art deliveries, and visits filled our early Summer schedule, capped by a wonderful 2 weeks in Italy. Monica and I traveled to Rome ā one of our favorite places to visit - and Florence (amazing food and Art!) but spent most of our time in a hidden corner of Tuscany at an Agriturismo I had visited in the year before Covid for a painting workshop. We set up a home base in our little apartment on a working family farm built around a church dating back almost a thousand years ago. We lingered over lovely meals, explored the Tuscan Maremma region, tasted wines from the area, and fell asleep to the sounds of owls and peepers. All of it, lovely. We also brought our art supplies ā watercolors and sketchbooks ā and spent part of most days wandering the olive groves and surrounding gardens, trying to make sense of the chaotic, overwhelming beauty in decay found at every angle in drawings and plein air paintings. We saw foxes, watched rainstorms from a distance, and made friends with a precocious wolfdog, a pet of the owners, who would emerge from behind the trees, curious as to what we were up to. The olive trees (the same ones that I mentioned in my last post) held my attention again as I found myself sitting for long periods in front of one ancient tree or another, sketching their twisting trunks and delicate leaves. I probably would have been content to do that all Summer.
Since Iāve returned to the studio here in Rhode Island, Iāve been holding on to that magical experience, continuing to make watercolors both small and large - some very large. I have my sketches to refer to and my studies from the field, but mostly, I work from memory and intuition. As Monica wrote about last week, mark-making can be a āway inā, and can be intimate and sensitive. For me, mark-making is, well, everything. Maybe because I have taught drawing for so long, itās something I think about a great deal. I tell my students that their mark is their handwriting. Itās something that is a part of us ā something we can learn and cultivate but often emerges stylistically without trying too hard. At its core, your mark is your language, unique to you, and the best thing that you can do is to try not to force it. We can all easily tell the difference between a beginning drawing student and someone who is more comfortable and more adept at their linework.
Good drawing is sophisticated, often not for the skill on display but for its directness and authenticity.
When Iām painting my larger abstractions, I use mark (brushstrokes) with color to create sensations. I look for color combinations, marks, and shapes that have resonance, suggestions of space or light. My works on paper are somehow different, more stripped down with more space, giving those marks more of a starring role, more breathing room.
Finding myself again in the landscape, the temptation for me is to revert to drawing in a representational way, observing, looking closely at every twist of the tree trunks and tangle of branches in an effort to better understand what it is Iām looking at. There are many pages in my sketchbook that are just that. Working in pen or pencil, my marks seek out edges and forms as something like a tree emerges from the paper. But what I really am looking for is something else, a mark that has a more tenuous hold on reality. Iām interested in capturing something of theĀ spiritĀ of my subject and theĀ experienceĀ of that moment.
The wind in the trees, smell of grass and earth, rain in the distance, visits from the wolfdog and Monica working nearby are all part of that experience. Not everything can be captured or defined in a line. In drawing, we put lines at the edges of things, lines where in life, lines donāt exist. We create boundaries ā this form ends here, and something else begins there. Why? Itās a strange convention if you stop to think about it, a way for lines on a 2-dimensional surface to be read as this thing or that. I like to think of my drawings ā and watercolors ā as not that ā not about boundaries but rather looking for ways to open up those boundaries. What happens when marks are assembled in a gathering of forms or movements across the page? Can I access something of my experience ā inspired by but not beholden to a version of representation? Can I let go of conventions and let mark and color be suggestive, evocative, and expressive without being overly descriptive? I donāt feel that I am painting trees, more that I am marking a place in time.