Since April 2020 I have been writing as much as painting, some weeks even more so. Between 1991 and 2004 I produced a series of plein-air landscapes of American battlefields. In 1992, a number of these appeared in Natural Defenses, a solo show at the Peninsula Fine Art Center in Newport News, Virginia. Curator Deborah McLeod put together a catalogue that also featured Civil War Redux, a concurrent solo exhibition by Richmond photographer Willie Anne Wright, and a group show focused on Landscape and memory. Given the historical undercurrent of my work, we decided to expand the standard tombstone labels to include short, descriptive texts. These had to be composed in a few days. It was the very first exhibition in which I paired words with imagery. The show traveled to other venues in Fairhope, Alabama and Johnson City, Tennessee. Similar narrative wall-labels were used in subsequent exhibitions at Asheville Art Museum, Danville (VA) Art Museum, Greenville (NC) Art Museum, Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA, and Waterworks Art Center in Salisbury, NC. For a variety of reasons, I kept the practice of writing on the back burner, until a life-changing event in 2005 led me back to it.
View of Murano, with Chiesa San Pietro. April 25, 2016. Journal painting 3.5 x 10.5 inches
Ten years ago, Kathie and I were invited to a private jazz sitar concert on the piano nobile of the Palazzo Donà dalle Rosa in Venice. As I sketched the fashionable crowd, a British gentleman noticed what I was doing and struck up a conversation. He was in Venice to conduct research for a book on its gardens. During our brief conversation, he shared that keeping notebooks was part of his daily routine. One of these was devoted to written sketches of every location he visited. This gave me pause to reconsider my own approach. Had I been more thorough at the time, his name might not have escaped me now. Unable to work in my studio the early days of the pandemic, I composed texts to accompany some of the hundreds of journal-paintings that filled my sketchbooks, publishing them as daily blogposts. As first it was a way to keep busy; a way of dealing with the endless wail of sirens, as ambulances rushed to collect the sick and dying. I was still processing the experience of exhibiting at the Hudson River Museum, in which around thirty of my works were paired with historic precedents mined from the permanent collection. Among these was Hudson River Port Folio, a series of color aquatints by William Guy Wall, with letterpress texts written by John Agg. Sitting at my desk in Washington Heights, I had to fly without a wing man.
(Hudson River Port Folio. West Point (number 16) William Guy Wall and John Agg. 1825)
The takeaway was a realization that drawing and writing might be blended into a single practice, provided they asked the same questions, by finding words that paint a picture, while making drawings that tell a story. Below is my riposte to Wall and Agg, in a format that has been put to work in the Sketchbook Traveler series produced by Schiffer Publishing.
Approaching this task as a gesamtkunstwerk, travel and research are as much the art, as its salable byproducts. Attention to how climate, geology, flora, fauna, and human activity shape the terrain, filtered through our intuitive, spiritual and aesthetic responses to space, light and weather, can also expand knowledge, generate ideas, and foster environmental awareness.
Read Quaranteam Traveler: Pandemic Sketchbook Blogposts April 1 to June 8, 2020.
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SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER: JOURNEYS AND JOURNALS
Each monthly issue will highlight works by historic and contemporary traveler artists, featuring contributions by subscribers and other living artists whose work involves mindful travel that promotes environmental awareness. The inaugural January 2022 issues features Louis I. Kahn sketchbooks, Albert Marquet and Santa Fe artist Molly Bolger Jenssen, with updates and notices of exhibitions and books, new and evergreen.
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