|
FONT de GAUME DRAWINGS
|
| |
|
London
|
| |
|
In June 2012, Kathy and I traveled to France with the artists Frje and Pam Echeverria. In addition to a week in Provence and a week in Paris, the nucleus of the trip for me was a week in the Dordogne region and the town of Les Eyzies. It was here that I had reserved three separate tours of the Paleolithic caves at Grotte de Font de Gaume.
|
| |
|
We started with three days in London, which proved more momentous than we anticipated. We saw a great deal of historically important art and Kathy and I took the very worthwhile bus tour to Stonehenge. Almost by accident, I discovered that the Queens Gallery at Buckingham Palace was exhibiting Leonardo da Vinci's comprehensive anatomy drawings. This was the most profound exhibit I have ever seen and I marveled at the refined pen and ink work.
|
| |
|
That night we went out to a pub for a last dinner in London before a 5:00am departure for Paris the next morning. This is where I let my guard down and my shoulder bag with my Journal and art supplies was stolen. It was a painful lesson about this great city. We made a report at a nearby police station where the officer suggested that the thief probably looked for valuables and ditched the rest. He said we had nothing to lose by looking for the bag.
|
| |
|
So Kathy and I spent our last night in London prowling back alleys and going through a large number of dumpsters. In a dumpster three or four blocks away from the pub I found my blue rain jacket. After searching a pub named "The City of Quebec", it started to get dark and rainy. It was then that I nearly got run over by a speeding taxi and the spell was broken. I had to let the bag go. We had a 5:00am departure for Paris and we needed to try to get some sleep.
|
| |
|
Les Eyzies
|
| |
|
In Paris we split from Pam and Frje and took a connecting train to Bordeaux where I immediately located an art supply store and bought drawing materials including a bottle of india ink. After taking a train to Perigueux, we drove a rental car to our apartment in Les Eyzies. Les Eyzies is simply gorgeous with its over-hanging rock faces and the Vezere River winding through town.
|
| |
|
The next morning we took the five-minute walk up the road to the visitor center at Font de Gaume. After a lifetime studying art history, it is indescribable to see these very sophisticated renderings of Bison, Horse, and Reindeer. The tours are tightly regulated and no cameras are allowed. There was some minimal electric lighting but still very dark. The half-hour tour went by fast.
|
| |
|
The next morning we went back to the caves for the second of the three tours I had reserved. The guide was a charismatic, English speaking gentleman named Jean-Marie. On a whim, I asked Jean-Marie if I could take a pencil and sketchbook with me and to my surprise, he consented. The tour moved along at a nimble pace and it was very dark. Yet at every stop I was able to get a quick sketch of the animals on the walls. Many of the sketches were no good but others were quite accurate and usable.
|
| |
|
That afternoon I walked further up the road to the cave at Combarelles where I saw an engraving of a Rhinoceros and a Lion. The next day the marble sculptor Matt Auvinen joined us. Kathy, Matt and I rented kayaks and paddled a wild and beautiful stretch of the Vezere River. The next morning Matt and I went to Font de Gaume for the third and final tour of the cave paintings. Once again I was allowed to take my sketchbook.
|
| |
|
Home
|
| |
|
After we returned to the U.S., I learned I was going to spend the next full year fabricating my Wild Horses installation for a July 2013 exhibit. As I neared this deadline, I began yearning to do some simple drawing. This was in part based on the profound Leonardo pen and ink drawings I saw in London. It was also partly inspired by my friend Tom Knight. He had been greatly moved by an exhibit of Richard Diebenkorn's early Berkeley abstractions. I reacquainted myself with them and became interested in exploring that sort of abstraction.
|
| |
|
I resolved to spend the 2013-14 winter doing ten black and white drawings. I used the sketches I did in the caves at Font du Gaume as my point of departure. Though they are reconfigured composites, there is not a line in the drawings that is not in the original cave sketches.
|
| |
|
I wanted to really push the abstraction and also to give the drawings a primal wildness. After carefully sketching the cave designs, I attacked the drawing with Ivory Black watercolor and the sumi brush that George Tsutakawa had given me. Then I carefully rendered volumes into the cave lines with pen and ink and some minimal experimenting with touches of white gauche.
|
| |
|
The drawings continue my exploration of reconfiguring pre-historic artifacts to discover modern pictographic symbols.
|
| |