To the right are Peggy Printz's sketches from Bhutan.
Here are a few books I've bought at the Morgan that feature works on paper, many of them travel sketches and watercolors:
Sketching at Home and Abroad: British Landscape Drawings, 1750-1850 (The Morgan Library)
Tales and Travels, by Kathleen Stuart (The Morgan Library)
The Thaw Collection of Master Drawings (The Morgan Library)
To the right are a couple of pages from Muggs Loudon's sketchbook, thematically connected. We talked about creating a 2 page layout where work would be unified either by theme or medium or color.
Sandy Rauen chose subject matter from the Methow Valley, a couple of deer she had seen near her home there.
Annika de Groot created a page about York Minster, focusing on a dramatic arch design.
I intend to focus on the geography of color in the Travel Journal classes I'm going to be teaching this winter both at the University Heights Center (class now full) and at Daniel Smith (spaces still available). I've written about palettes and places before on my blog, but I just happened to find a copy of the book Colors of the World by Jean-Philippe and Dominique Lenclos and it is exactly about what I want to teach. How do you learn what the palette of any given place is? Being an artist, keeping a sketchbook or journal really sensitizes you; you begin to notice the indigenous building materials, flora and fauna, angle of light, local color preferences, everything that adds up to the unique character of any given place. I posted my sketch of the Grand Canal in Venice (sketched from a photo I took from Santa Maria della Salute late in the afternoon in March after being lost for two hours while searching for this view!) because most people believe there is something very unusual and singular about the colors of Venice, mainly due to the northern light as it filters through the marine atmosphere of the lagoon and rests on the tiles and ochre and cream hues of the buildings there. Artists have been obsessed with it since the 18th century; take a look at J.M.W. Turner's revolutionary watercolors painted there; other artists have been equally enamored of the place. Dominique Lenclos wrote that the world is ..."faced with the danger of a universal and uniform culture..." Recording and remarking upon what we find that is unique and special, and then doing what we can to preserve that is important in the world we live in, filled as it is with chain stores and mini-malls. Venice may have been the first place that architects, artists and planners, travelers and politicians realized needed preservation. I just read a short piece in the New York Times on the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who died on Monday at the age of 91. She wrote in the New York Review of Books, “When so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.”
To the right is another tree sketch, this one of a Sitka spruce that I saw on the Oregon coast in 2011. I've sketched this tree outside the studio at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology many times--every year that I visit, in fact! I never tire of it--this ancient and massive specimen!
I was recently reading from Rilke's 9th Duino Elegy. A passage follows that really struck me as being somehow about what we are all attempting as we keep our journals, both written and sketched and painted.
because truly being here is so
much; because everything
apparently needs us, this fleeting
world...
Why is it so compelling to sketch and paint the subjects that we encounter when we travel? This image to the left is a tower on the Royal Palace in Dresden. There are answers in the tower pictured here-- I was so taken with the whimsy of the angular windows --so completely counter to my expectation of what a window should look like, plus the sgraffito decoration on the turret which I'd never seen before. The encounter of the strange, the whimsical, the utterly beautiful, or the completely unexpected--it seems to call forth some effort at replication for all of us. Some people write about it, others photograph, and many of us attempt to draw and paint. I came across a great quote by the 19th century Austrian architect Camillo Sitte:
Enchanting recollections of travel form part of our most pleasant reveries. Magnificent town views, monuments and public squares, beautiful vistas all parade before our musing eye, and we savor again the delights of those sublime and graceful things in whose presence we were once so happy.
Join me on January 27 at the Seattle Daniel Smith Artist Materials store for a one day workshop on travel journals. We'll revisit our favorite trips, learning how to paint and draw buildings and landscapes--I'll demonstrate methods for drawing and painting in simple ways that will make it fun.
