Often working directly in urban landscapes, Kate Downie is as much interested in the non spaces that are overlooked and the edgelands of our townscapes, as the iconic architecture that can appear to dominate a city. Working at a variety of scales, she is often to be found drawing directly in front of her subject; mud, rust and grass stains can therefore become just as important as her charcoal marks. Rolling up, flattening out, dragging along the ground, pinning up, falling down, being trod on and dropped are all actions that are recorded in her drawings. They bear witnesses to the act of ‘being there’. She also brings her studies back into the gallery and works directly from them, often merging different views together in order to create a 'poetic' meditation on her collective experience.
Kate Downie
This video of Downie making the drawing above will give you an idea of her working methods when she is drawing in a gallery or exhibition space.
It is useful to compare how Downie works with what John Virtue has to say. He has worked for years in black ink, often mixed into shellac. Virtue will work into the raw canvas, stating he wants to 'bleed the image in', he goes on to say that he likes 'the idea of the image impressing itself into the canvas'. He uses rags, hands and all kinds of brushes, all in an attempt to get the right effect.
John Virtue
Virtue uses his materials to create an edge between the becoming of the paint, (often oil mixed with shellac) and the becoming of the landscape. You feel a tug between the two states and if at one moment he finds the image of what he is looking at too powerful, he reasserts the act of painting. Pushing and pulling image against paint until a sort of stasis is arrived at that oscillates between the two. In the flicker of betweenness be lets us back in to the moment of the landscape's perception, a window into his own experience of both looking at the landscape and painting a response to it.
Artist Matthew Rangel hikes cross-country and through the mountains, exploring and drawing along the way. He then constructs drawings that combine the various ways that he has experienced his journey. This can mean that he has to combine maps, with diagrams, photographs and observed drawings. He is another artist that relies on a grid to give structure and coherence to his images. The vertical ruled lines are also perfect structural scaffolding for his annotations.
Matthew Rangel
Rangel also uses concertina sketchbooks, which allow him to travel through the landscape making annotations in a sequence that reflects the passage of experience. He may well have looked at Chinese and Japanese scrolling landscape drawings, which can have a very similar feel to his images.
John Wolseley, an Australian artist, makes large works on paper that represent an inventory or document about the state of the earth. He usually works out in the landscape and sees himself a a hybrid between an artist and a scientist. He has made markings by rubbing his paper against burnt branches after bush fires have burnt themselves out, by burying his paper or by letting insects make their tracks across it. His drawings are as much as a record of the physical experience of being in the landscape, as an observed visual document. The drawings also include written notes and diagrammatic reflections on what is happening to the flora and fauna that he encounters.
John Wolseley: Murray-Sunset refugia with 14 ventifacts (2008–10)
carbonized wood, watercolour and graphite on 15 sheets of paper, 120 x 232 cm
History of the Whipstick Forest with ephemeral swamps and gold bearing reefs 2011
watercolour, charcoal and graphite on paper 234 x 287cm
Nicholas Herbert is much more conventional in his approach, but nevertheless just as interesting. If you are ever thinking of mixing pastel into your drawings he is a good artist to look at. Like most artists he is really interested in where his materials come from, and in his case he keeps a blog where he can reflect on these things.
Nicholas Herbert
Herbert in the tradition of Turner, inserts himself into the landscape and in particular responds to those misty days when valleys come in and out of focus. Masses of trees can loom dark against soft white mist in the early morning, or clouds shadowing the sun can cast alternative dark and light patches onto the gradually emerging forms of hills and valleys. These drawings are almost paintings, I like the way he keeps the surface of untreated paper coming through, it's as if the support is the ground of the landscape. He is very sensitive to his materials and you feel as if the materials of ink, chalk, pastel and wash are directly in tune with his observations of earth, atmosphere, rain and wind blown vegetation.
Emily Nelligan now well into her 80s has been drawing charcoal landscapes for well over 50 years. She is interested above all in light and her drawings of clouds, the light reflecting off water and similar subjects, point to how delicately a material like charcoal can be handled.
Emily Nelligan
When you look at Nelligan's drawings, the thing that impresses you is her use of the paper grain. Something that is often mistreated, or simply ignored, but in her case she glides her charcoal across the surface, never smudging it into that amorphous blob that it is so easy to do with charcoal, but keeping it crisp and yet atmospheric. It's so easy to overwork drawings like this, but you can tell they come from observation and experience and not from trying to copy photographs.
Marie Lorenz, Untitled (Corpse), 2007; charcoal on vellum
A series of charcoal on vellum drawings and rubbings acts as a chronicle of Lorenz’s navigation of urban waterways. Lorenz uses a journey down a river to create a series of interconnecting works that emerge from the process of making a journey. Her landscapes are also stories. Sometimes rubbings are taken from both the landscape and the boat that she travels in, forming an indexical relationship with the experience, literally bringing part of the experience back into the studio.
What is interesting about contemporary landscape drawing is both the continuing influence of the past and the reshaping of that by more contemporary concerns such as performance or documentation. Contact with other disciplines also helps keep renewing ideas about the role of drawing in relation to landscape, for instance when art and geology or geography combine in mapmaking, or when art meets data analysis as in the work of Matt Willey whose work has tried to show the impact of the economy and human activities on the environment.
Mat Willey
However it's Easter and I'm sure you are all taking a well earned break. Some of you may however well find yourselves out in the landscape and if so think about its potential for being a source for your work. I'm off for a break myself and will be making my own contributions to this old and venerable tradition, so I will not be posting any thoughts about drawing until I return. I will however leave you with an artist that geologists still look upon with awe, one that for the first time spotted the layering of the Earth's crust.
Da Vinci: Tuscan Landscape
See also:
Embodied drawing (Notes from a conference where several artists were working in and with the landscape)
Really amazing...
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