Kathie had booked a waterfall tour for Sunday. Things did not go as planned. In, stead, they went far better than expected. Three Super Jeeps made up our caravan. Leaving Reykjavik, we head east on Highway 1, the southern coast road. Passing route 38 on our right, the land drops away. A broad inlet off to our right is fed by an estuary that snakes across the plain below. Passing the foot of table-lands rising steeply to our left, we drive past the town of Selfoss. Our driver Arni (pronounced “Arnie”) informed us that Chess-champion Bobby Fischer is buried at a churchyard not far from here. “I thought Fischer was Jewish,” I replied. “How is it that he is buried in a churchyard?”  Arni couldn’t say for sure, but he explained that most Icelanders are Lutheran, and not by choice. When the island fell under Danish rule, Lutheranism was the compulsory denomination for all legal baptisms.    “The story we Americans are told in school,” I tell Arni, “was that Leif Ericsson had converted to Christianity a thousand years ago.” “That may be true,” Arni replied, “but many continued to worship the old gods. Some still do.” I tell him about how indigenous Puebloan towns in the American Southwest celebrate both Catholicism and traditional Kiva mysteries—not in defiance of Christianity, but in a blending of spiritual traditions. Early Christian Europe was syncretic; building its flock by converting pagan deities into Christian saints. Medieval cathedrals were often built on the site of Roman temples that had replaced indigenous places of worship. “That’s very interesting,” Arni replies, “but I don’ think the Lutheran church would go for it.” I ask him how Icelanders were persuaded Icelanders to go along with the church. Arni laughed. “We finally agreed to embrace Christianity, but only if the church let us keep our slaves and eat our horses.”

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Now available: SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER: Special Offer from Ecoartspace.org: All three volumes for $45.00 (a savings of $29.85) ORDER HERE

The outflow of Lake George (Andiatarocte) tumbles into Lake Champlain (Pitawbagok), down an escalade of cataracts aptly named the La Chute River. The trail that followed its stream was a key portage (carrying-place), between the Saint Lawrence watershed and the Hudson Valley. The land north of the narrow waterway functioned as a no-man’s-land between Mohawk (Kanien’kehá-ka) and Abenaki (Wôbanakiak) territories. To the west, the iron hills of the western Adirondacks. The eastern boundary of this contested ground is the river-like stretch of upper Lake Champlain. The northernmost extremity of this demilitarized zone is a thumb-shaped peninsula, bordered on the west by swampy wetlands and Bulwagga Bay. This finger of land is known today as Crown Point—not be confused with the village on Putnam Creek five miles to the south. The origin of its name is a matter of conjecture. The French dubbed it Pointe á la Chevelure, because its shape resembled a trophy scalp. During peacetime in precolonial times, this headland served as a meeting-place and trading hub. During periods of hostility, it became a bloody battleground. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain organized an expedition of Wyandot, Algonquin and Montagnais warriors to seize control of the strategic La Chute portage. Haudenosaunee warriors hastened from the Mohawk Valley, to meet the invaders somewhere between Crown Point and Ticonderoga. As both sides traded boasts and insults, the French explorer stepped forward with sang-froid, lowered his arquebus, and blasted a load of buck and ball into the Iroquois formation. When the smoke cleared, three chiefs lay dead on the field. The rest dispersed in terror, unaware that what awaited them in the centuries to come  would prove to be far worse.

On Tuesday October 24, 2023, I delivered an online book talk hosted by NAMTA:  the International Art Materials Association, which is comprised of. . . “suppliers, retailers and creative professionals in the fine art and craft materials industry—provide the tools that empower artists and makers to inspire the world.” (The recording is 31.54 minutes)  

WATCH NOW

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READ MORE: WEEKLY DISPATCHES & UPDATES

New Monotypes by James Lancel McElhinney  at William Havu Gallery

New monotypes by James Lancel McElhinney monotypes were produced by renowned master printer Michael Costello of Hand Graphics in Santa Fe, who has also worked with artists such as Woody Gwynn, Edgar Heap of Birds, Forrest Moses, Nathan Olivera, and Kay WalkingStick. These unique images are created with 100% archival materials; printed with oil-based inks on Rives BFK etching paper, using a technique known as Chine-collé (Chinese-pasted), in which the painted image is printed onto a thin sheet of semi translucent paper, secured to the substrate paper with wheat starch paste. The paper used in this process is Kitakata Awagami—an acid-free Japanese paper made of Philippine gampi fibers. A unique linear image was drawn by hand onto the Kitakata with a bamboo pen in orange ink. Each monotype was made with multiple impressions on a Takach etching press.

For information email

in**@wi****************.com











, or call +1 (303) 893-2360

Moonrise White Rock Canyon, coming off the press at Hand Graphics Santa Fe

James Lancel McElhinney was featured in the new book The American West in Art: Selections form the Denver Art Museum (2022) and in the March 2023 issue of Western Art Collector magazine.

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His artworks can be found locally in the collections of the Denver Art Museum Petrie Institute for Western Art, and the University of Denver Library Special Collections. His works are also found in the collections of:

Albany Institute of History and Art. Albany, New York
Avery Fine Art and Architecture Library, Columbia University
Boscobel House and Gardens, Garrison, New York
City of Philadelphia. Water Department Archives.
Free Library of Philadelphia. Print and Picture Collection
Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia Pennsylvania
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers New York
Huntington Library and Museum, San Marino, California
Newberry Library. Chicago, Illinois
New York Public Library. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photography
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Archives and Special Collections
Swarthmore College. Library Special Collections
Temple University. Samuel L. Paley Library Special Collections
West Point Museum, United States Military Academy
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven Connecticut
And private collections in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Zealand.

I have been notified that preordered copies of Sketchbook Traveler: New England  are now being shipped! This is the third volume in a trilogy produced by Schiffer Publishing—a family-owned nonfiction press founded in 1974, headquartered in Atglen, PA. I could not be more delighted and gratified with the book, which is now available to own. LINK

DOWNLOAD a copy of the press release: LINK

I am profoundly grateful to the great team at Schiffer Publishing, who were able to produce this trilogy in the midst of a global pandemic. Now that the worst has passed, it’s time to dust off our boots and take to the road, with a sketchbook in hand.

Look inside Sketchbook Traveler: New England:

ENJOY ALL THREE:

Hudson Valley: https://schifferbooks.com/products/sketchbook-traveler-1
Southwest: https://schifferbooks.com/products/sketchbook-traveler
New England: https://schifferbooks.com/products/sketchbook-traveler-new-england

Sketchbook Traveler: New England  is the third volume in a series produced by Schiffer Publishing—a family-owned nonfiction press headquartered in Atglen, PA, that was founded in 1974.  I could not be more delighted and gratified with the book, which is now available to own. LINK

DOWNLOAD a copy of the press release: LINK

Inside Sketchbook Traveler: New England:

SPECIAL OFFER FROM ECOARTSPACE.COM:                              Three books for the price of two:

A la Carte:

Hudson Valley: https://schifferbooks.com/products/sketchbook-traveler-1
Southwest: https://schifferbooks.com/products/sketchbook-traveler
New England: https://schifferbooks.com/products/sketchbook-traveler-new-england
To contact me directly, send an email to

ja***@mc***********.com

THANKS TO MY READERS

As we enter the second month of my Substack , let me thank you all for your support. Exploring backstories of itineraries and places through travel, drawing, and photography, are unpacked in writings that appear in this online publication as essays. articles, and notes from the field. The format will be as follows.
An essay will be published on the first day of each month, with new articles appearing every Thursday, field notes appearing on Sundays. Plans are underway to develop a podcast. If you are enjoying these articles, please SUBSCRIBE, and share this LINK with others whom you think might enjoy them.

Many thanks for your support!

Here is what you all can look forward to in July and August:

July 1:  On the Verge: An Alternative Backstory

July 6: Reconnaissance: Herkimer on the Mohawk

July 9: Sketchbook Sojourns: Iceland: At the Summit of Eyjafjallajökull

July 13: Mohawk Valley Reconnaissance: Little Falls 1

July 16: Sketchbook Sojourns: Catskill Mountains: North South Lake

July 20: Mohawk Valley Reconnaissance: Little Falls 2

July 23: Sketchbook Sojourns: Ellis Island

July 27: Mohawk Valley Reconnaissance: Fort Plain

July 30: Sketchbook Sojourns: Monument Valley

August 1:  The Man from Nuremberg: Plein Air Albrecht Dürer

August 3: Mohawk Valley Reconnaissance: Martyr’s Shrine

August 6: Fort Johnson on the Mohawk

August 10: Reconnaissance: Schoharie Creek to Putnam’s Store

August 13: Sketchbook Sojourns: Schuylkill River: Three Angels

August 17: Mohawk Valley Reconnaissance: Yankee Hill

August 20: Sketchbook Sojourns: Cape Elizabeth

August 24: Mohawk Valley Reconnaissance: Rotterdam

August 27: Sketchbook Sojourns: White Rock Canyon

August31: Champlain Valley Reconnaissance: Cohoes

Sketchbook Traveler: New England will be released on August 28 by Schiffer Publishing. Learn more: LINK

Preorder HERE

Visit my website: https//www.mcelhinneyart.com

DOWNLOAD PDF of the article from the July-August 2019 issue of Orientations magazine. This is intended for the exclusive use of reviewers and publishers’ acquisitions editors. Any other use or unauthorized distribution is prohibited.

Download (PDF, 2.9MB)

“Diarist and painter Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) recorded his 1494-95 travels in watercolors of alpine scenes and views of Italy, many of which survive today. Dürer was not unique in this practice. Few of his contemporaries traveled so much as he, nor took similar pains to preserve their sketchbooks and journals. Leonard da Vinci (1452-1519). In 1520, Dürer journeyed from Nuremberg to Aachen, to attend the imperial coronation of the new Holy Roman emperor Charles V, whom Dürer hoped would renew the pension granted to him by the late Maximilian I, and to land a few portrait commissions to pay for the trip. He bundled up his long-suffering (or insufferable) wife Agnes, a maid, and a cargo of prints he hope to sell along the way. Traveling through The Netherlands, Dürer filled a silverpoint sketchbook with drawings of landscapes, animals, buildings, and human beings. Only one sketchbook from the trip is known to exist. There may have been more, but none so far have come to light.

Readers may be unfamiliar with the drawing technique known as silverpoint. A coating of opaque white watercolor is first thinly applied to a sheet of paper. Dürer would have used Flake White (Lead Carbonate) as the pigment. Drawing on this surface with a silver needle produces a linear effect similar to graphite. What happens is when silver touches lead, a chemical reaction leaves faint marks on the page.  These slowly darken as the silver residue tarnishes.

Graphite (1.CB. O5a) is a naturally-occurring crystalline form of Carbon harvested by mining. Prior to the 19^th century it was widely used as an industrial lubricant. Joseph Dixon (1799-1869) discovered the mineral’s potential as a writing material, by inventing a way of enclosing a thin graphite rod within a Cedar wood holder. He first manufactured these pencils. . .”

The text above is an excerpt from a Substack article scheduled to appear on July 1, 2023. To receive a link, and future notifications, sign up for a free subscription below:

Left: John Henry Fuseli (1741-1825).  Right: John Britton (1771-1857)

“We have been told that landscape painting is the lowest branch of the Fine Arts, and that those who practise it are little better than ‘topographers and map-makers’. Thus a whole class has been stigmatized for the insipidity, or tasteless puerility of a few of its members.”

—John Britton . Fine Arts of the English School. 1812

I stumbled across an engaging article by Martin Myrone in Picturing Places; a blog feed published by the British Library. John Britton was an art writer with a considerable following in his day. The quote above is taken from his riposte to a Royal Academy lecture delivered in 1804 by the Swiss-born art professor John Henry Fuseli, who dismissed topographical painting as

“.. . . no more than the transcript of a spot. . . not be entitled to the pleasure we receive, or the admiration we bestow.”

In other words, Fuseli held the opinion that parlor artists in powdered wigs represented greater value to society than explorers and naturalists who risked life and limb to increase the scope of human knowledge. Fuseli’s argument sought to elevate the academy above a glorified trade-school. By putting taste before science, he opined that whatever empirical observation diminishes imagination. Fuseli’s self-serving bias not only denigrated landscape painting. It drove a wedge between science and art, and turned the Dionysian-Apollonian dialectic into an us-or-them crusade for dominance, in which academic figuration was the odds-on winner. Fuseli’s attitude toward landscape painting implicitly disdains a subject so highly regarded in East Asia, where landscape painting had flourished, long before the battle of Hastings.

Fuseli today might be hooted off the stage as a racist, colonialist xenophobe. To be fair, most westerners were all of that in 1804. Alas, many today still are. June of that year, Britain’s House of Commons passed a bill abolishing the slave trade, which the House of Lords overturned. Following the final defeat of French arms in 1803, Haitian leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the wholesale murder of the island’s white inhabitants. The slaughter of 3-5,000 men, women, and children fueled slaveholder paranoia, and the cause of white supremacy. Not long after Fuseli’s lecture, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of France. Alexander von Humboldt had just returned to Europe, after briefing Thomas Jefferson on the Prussian scientist’s four-year expedition through Latin America. Meanwhile, on the Great Plains of North America, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery were settling in for a long winter, as guests of the Mandan nation. In the grand scheme of things, Fuseli’s pontifications is hardly worthy of mention.

By today’s standards, Fuseli’s argument is wrongheaded, entirely out of step with today’s new global perspectives. So why should anyone still march to his tune? Fuseli’s concept of fine art is closely intertwined with the same notions of racial superiority that gave civilized colonizers the moral authority to enslave primitive workers, and to cleanse conquered lands of savage indigenes. It seems to me that subjecting the creative spirit to the dictates of art-critical priorities is like pulling the lion’s teeth. The real power of art lies not only in its capacity to delight, but in its power to explore, discover, and instruct—to transform personal experience into knowledge and ideas.

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