I spend a lot of time (some would say an excessive amount) looking at things, sitting down in a place so I can see what’s around me, bringing things in so I can see them better. As a child, I almost became a believer in magic when I discovered the tracks of bark beetles, clearly a form of writing, and the imprint of the stigma on the spongy-thick innermost petal of a yellow pond-lily, which looks like a stamp of a radiant sun.
I am pretty old now and I’ve done a lot of different things for a living – milking cows, picking apples, pruning orchards, bagging clothespins, weaving yardage, making art quilts, instructing undergraduates and elementary school kids and teachers, teaching drawing (mostly to retirees), writing and illustrating natural history subjects for scientific and educational publications, and selling drawings and paintings. The constant is contemplation. Just staring at the world and taking it in. There is nothing better to do with the time I have on Earth, if you ask me.
I live next to two small post-glacial lakes, the King Ponds, near South Woodbury, Vermont. I’ve known them my whole life and spent a good deal of time around and in them. For years I’ve been drawing the things that live there. We walk around, human size, with the eyes we have, and we easily notice things that are in a particular middle size range, because we move too fast or we simply overlook what is small. We need first to slow down, then to get out the hand lens, the dissecting scope, the compound scope. What is more surprising than the world under our noses?
The smallest organisms I’ve ever drawn are these below – the large starry one is the diatom Asterionella. Each spicule is about 50 microns long, or one-twentieth of a millimeter. There’s a Mallomonas in the lower left corner and an unidentified green alga in the upper left. I have a plankton net, good for the copepods and cladocerans that live suspended in the water by the zillions. But the tiny diatoms and green and golden algae go right through it. When a team of paleolimnologists visited in the summer of 2009, Bill D’Andrea, now at Columbia University, had the kind of fine-mesh net that catches the really little stuff. I borrowed some and put it under the compound scope. By holding the digital camera up to the eyepiece, I got photographs clear enough to draw from.
Silverpoint is drawing with a pure silver stylus, a medium from the Renaissance – not much used since the advent of graphite – a little finicky (paper has to be prepared, there’s no erasing, it’s never really dark), but I like it for its subtlety. The marks, with time, tarnish warmer and darker, and there is nothing that looks quite like it.
Scale is always an element in any representational work, as are framing and composition. How big is your subject, and how big should your picture of it be? What happens when you go in closer and stop looking at the whole? What subjects catch the imagination and make you want to draw them? What will you leave out, and not draw?
I look for pattern. Shapes, structures, repetition with variations – those catch the eye. Turn over a leaf to observe its venation. There’s a spot at the edge of the upper King Pond where a west-facing slope covered with hemlocks comes down to the pond edge and there’s enough light for a vigorous shrub layer of hobblebush and goosefoot maple. I made a series of drawings of them. Two are side by side at the top of this article.
These are big, thin leaves- lots of surface for photosynthesis, too fragile to be out in the wild but perfect for a semi-shady spot. Looking at those leave,you see that not just the mid- and lateral veins but also that the veins connecting the laterals are striking. Leaves this size need more structure than small ones, and they have very different ways to solve the same problem. One with undulating cross-veins like waves, one with a system of segments from each lateral vein that meet in the middle and form an irregular honeycomb of polygons. The shapes are similar but never the same. A person could spend a long time looking at such a leaf.
Planktonic Algae, 5" x 6”, silverpoint and gouache on paper.
