One morning in assembly the counsellors announced the first overnight sailing trip to nearby Rabbit Island, This small trip would be a good practice of sailing and camping skills before heading off on longer jaunts. Rabbit Island is a dinky outcrop covered with trees, with just enough space to pitch a few tents. It was just across the water from my cabin. After they had sailed off and pitched camp, I borrowed a dry bag from the kayaking team, filled it with notebooks, pencils, watercolours and cookies, put on my swimsuit, and set off across the water to surprize the campers with after dinner drawing activites.
Some call it art - I call it an adventure!
Surrounded by mountains, and with all this adventuring going on, I wasn't content to just stay in the art workshop. During my first week at camp I joined Bunyan and a van load of boys on a day trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway, a linear National Park which runs along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains.
After a picnic lunch amongst tree roots, and sheltering from a sudden downpour in the van, we hiked down a pathway with views overlooking wooded mountains and stopped at a stream for an extended drawing session. Another time, on a lazy hot afternoon, I led an afternoon walk from camp to the nearby forests for a meditative tree drawing session.
Many people are nervous about drawing, thinking they can’t do it, they don’t know what to draw, they might get bored. Well. These thoughts are not unfamiliar to artists. One way I like to get people to start is by looking at the subject and drawing without looking at the paper. I invited told the boys to imagine an ant crawling over the leaves of a nearby plant or a squirrel running among the branches of the distant trees or mountains, and to let their pencils trace the movement on paper. For tone or depth, we could imagine a worm or a bird, burrowing or diving into hollows, tracing this movement through the pressure or scribbles of their pencils.
I make trip drawing packs with stiff card, pencils, pens and gouache and lead several waterfall drawing and swimming hikes. We make colourful abstract drawings by using gouache to create lumpy rock shapes and directional ink lines to capture the rushing water and reaching trees. Then we go for a swim.
In camp, colour and adventure leaked into other activites. We visited the snakes and spiders in the Nature Lab, then came back to the workshop to make plaster casts which we later painted. One morning we headed to the barn to draw and paint horses.
It was great fun teaching and leading activites, but I was also hoping to make some larger scale interactive sculpture for the camp, and I’ll write about that in my next post.
