To the degree that we are able to draw closer to Nature, to heal this broken primal relationship, our lives — mind, body, and spirit — take on a harmony, a grace, a wholeness, and an endlessly resourceful, gentle, and indomitable power.
~ Peter London ~
For the past year and a half, I have been doing something I treasure: keeping a perpetual journal. Inspired by the work of botanical artist Lara Call Gastinger, I took a blank artist’s journal and dated 52 spreads. Then, each week, I drew something I found on walks and hikes. At the beginning of this year, I went back to the first week and began adding another drawing to each week. I’ll do this for a few years until the pages are full and I need to start on another journal.
Drawing and photography share traits. Both take a three-dimensional world and render it in two dimensions. Good examples of either have taken thought, experience, noticing, attentiveness. The best arise from the depths of the artist’s passions.
The two art forms also differ. Although some artists create photorealistic works, most drawings simplify the subject much further than a photo does, sometimes dramatically. An expressive line drawing can have a powerful impact with no detail whatsoever.
Because I’m a nature photographer, I take photos outdoors. I occasionally take something home to photograph against a blank background. But mostly I’m enmeshed in the same environment as my subject. The light, air, wind, sky, dirt all affect the photo and the taking of the photo. As does the background. I’ve passed on many beautiful flowers because their backgrounds couldn’t do them justice.
Timing and light are crucial factors. On a sunny day, light for photography is best at either end of the day. On a cloudy day, it’s the opposite. To complicate things, clouds are always moving and changing light patterns. The place matters. The clear, blue light high in the mountains differs from the light saturated in the desert or softened by the sea.
All of that changes with drawing. You choose when and where and can give the work all the time in the world. You decide on the lighting. The background is often minimal, especially in botanical art. Even if you’re drawing outdoors, you can choose elements to include or leave out in a way the camera cannot.
The creation of art is not some esoteric activity of a gifted few; it is the natural way of forming meaning.
But the biggest difference, to me, is that drawing brings you even closer to the nature of the being you are seeing. Camera in hand, I am alert and attentive, looking for light, beauty, setting, contrast, interest. A macro lens brings me to minute grains of pollen on a petal, telling me bees have been visiting. A zoom lens shows me a party of tiny beetles in the heart of a flower. Then I stand up and take a picture of the light on my backyard mountain. Every walk can be wonder-filled.
Drawing is equally wonderful but different. With pencil in hand, I am not just seeing how a leaf or a petal folds. I’m making that same fold with my fingers. I’m participating directly in shapes, lines, mysteries. I see how leaves meet along stems. If I want to portray a petal, I need to see how it arises from the ovary, how it overlaps other petals. How its lines curve down and peek from underneath a neighboring petal. It’s not that I don’t see those things when I’m taking a photo. But I can leave the capturing of details to the camera. A drawing comes through my body.
In 2007 and 2009, I took two art workshops called Drawing Closer to Nature. Both were the richest art experiences I’ve ever had. Everything about them — the brilliant Peter London who led them, the wildly creative participants, the way we went about fulfilling Peter’s ‘encounters’ — was sublime. The quotes throughout this essay are from a book he wrote with the same name.
Each form, examined, provides the observer a distinctive lens through which Nature manifests a different aspect of itself.
Discouraged by feeling he had reached the end of his decades-long artistic life as an abstract expressionist, Peter had an epiphany on a wintry, post-storm beach walk. Nature was everywhere, insistent, forming and in formation at every moment. The lines left in the sand as the tide receded spoke to him of the complex forces creating them. Gravity, wind, topography, the moon and stars. The water itself, its resistance, viscosity, surface tension. All working “in tandem upon the denser stuff of the universe, [drawing] these exquisite and delicate lines.”
Deciding that “the way Nature creates the world is the way I want to create art,” his art took a different direction. I join his host of students in saying that mine did, too. As a landscape designer, I had been creating in and with the natural world for many years. I had been drawn to plants since early childhood. Over my art table is a landscape I painted at age nine. Nevertheless, I left his workshops open to larger visions of drawing and painting my way closer to nature.
We do not transform Nature by our efforts; Nature transforms us by our efforts.
The perpetual journal is part of that exploration into the heart of the green world. It’s a continuing meditation on detail, surprise, joy, discovery. On nature itself, on my journey through the year, on the intricacies and beauties that our gorgeous Earth showers on us. It gives me, to quote Peter, a “quiet and sufficient sense of wonder.”
~ RELATED POSTS ~
My title is poet Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life. Guidance I have never been more willing to follow! On a road trip, I found myself on forest roads bordered for miles with flowers. So I am celebrating astonishment, beauty, and living in those transcendent states.
My youngest nephew is standing at the gates of adulthood, appalled by what he sees. He has a lot of company. What stayed with me after one visit was Ira’s asking where I find comfort and inspiration in the face of our challenges. This is my answer.
For five years, from age two to seven, I lived in paradise. I roamed woods, ponds, meadows, gardens. That vivid sprite, trailing leaves and flowers and dirt, is still with me. Most children, especially today, are not so blessed. Their loss is tragic for all of us, and for the future of the planet.