Over the Easter Break I visited Tblisi, Georgia, accompanying my husband who had a conference there. He’s an academic and travels a lot with his work. I haven’t accompanied him to conferences over the years, but now that we are parents of adult children and as he does travel to some fantastic places, I hope to join him more often. With these travel opportunities, I want to find ways to develop ideas and have continuity with my studio practice. Over this trip, I decided to do just that, through drawing.
I wanted to create a portable studio, but needed to keep the materials and objectives simple. After a bit of investigation I settled on a hardback watercolour notebook, my mechanical pencil for sketching composition, several ink pens with permanent ink for sketching, and a water soluble pencil for shading. And on top of materials, some structure was needed. Setting aside an hour a day to sit in a cafe and draw, I decided to concentrate on outlines, composition and tone, and to use words to frame the sketches, with the aim of creating a coherent visual diary. I hoped to develop an approach to drawing outside the studio that I could use for future trips, abroad or even at a local museum.
I find that drawing outdoors is complicated- there is a lot of visual information to take in and select from. My work usually centres around much simpler, more focussed and (increasingly now) abstract drawings. To simplify my approach to the complicated subjects I encountered in Georgia, I decided to work with just outline and tone to reduce the choices I would have to make when observing the intricacies of the city environment. In fact, I was a bit nervous and felt like quite the novice, despite my experience with paper and ink. This might be surprising to hear, but many artists do feel that nervousness when it comes to drawing. During a three-week drawing residency several years ago, I had daily conversations with other painters, sculptors, graphic or conceptual artists, centred around the question ‘What is drawing?’. Many would blurt out ‘I can’t draw!’, including those who were sitting in front of their own artworks that suggested quite the opposite. I guess everyone has different judgements of what ‘good’ drawing should look like.
So I was nervous, sitting down with a coffee in public, trying to look like I knew what I was doing. Fortunately, looking closely at the landscape and letting your pen make marks has a way of pulling you out of your head and into the environment. When I give drawing lessons, especially to those who are uncertain about it, I often start with the exercise of sketching without looking at the page. You can’t possibly feel bad about the resulting strange lines and proportions if you haven't been looking at what you’re doing! But you do take more notice of the things you are looking at, becoming aware of the visual choices you make. Do you draw around an object, draw its shadow, leave the outline of one object to trace the line of another? Do you get caught up in smalll details or try for broad sweeps and composition? What if something moves? How do you draw tone if you’re using a line to draw?
With this set of drawings, I used two ink pens. Over the past month I’ve been drawing with a gel roller ball pen and have enjoyed its even, consistent line. I prefer the indelible, defiant qualities of ink to the smudgy key of pencil. But ink is a bit tricky to handle- you can’t erase, and you can’t modulate the line thickness or tone as easily. As someone who works more frequently in three dimensions, I find perspective and tone unintuitive, so with the first few drawings I concentrated on the relationships between forms. Though I did focus on outlines, I tried to let my pen move from one shape to another, using this to feel my way into perspective and composition. Towards the end I used my water soluble pencil to shade in areas of tone and a water brush to blend.
I purchased my black fountain pen just before my trip and I really like it! It gives a much greater range of line thickness, allowing me to use line more expressively. With the gel pen my drawings tend to be more graphic and flat, whereas the fountain pen enables me to bring more depth into the compositions.
Now back in Cambridge, and especially now as the weather warms up for the spring and summer, I’ll continue drawing, trying to approach my familiar environment with a traveller’s eye.
