© D. Yael Bernhard
Drawing is the wellspring of creativity. It’s vitally important for artists to keep that creative energy flowing, drawing often to practice and develop the skills needed to depict just about anything. Drawing is also a pleasure, a relaxing way of playing with ideas.
For me, there’s nothing more satisfying than sketching a landscape on a sunny spring day. I did this pencil drawing three days ago while walking along a dirt road in Margaretville, NY. It’s a favorite road for dog walkers, and I met several happy canines and their owners along the way. The road parallels a stream that empties into the Pepacton Reservoir, then cuts through rolling fields that dip down to a shady hemlock grove, and rises again toward upward-sloping hills bordered with stone walls, with distant views of the western Catskills. This varied terrain is an artist’s heaven. When I came around a curve and saw this panorama, I sat down on the side of the road and took out my sketchbook. I had only thirty minutes to draw, but it was enough.
Here in the Northeast, plentiful rain also means plenty of underbrush and thick foliage. Once the trees leaf out, these textures are both challenging and time-consuming to draw. That’s why I like early spring for landscape drawing and painting. Bare and budding, the trees are simpler and more interesting to articulate, and the color is subtle and suggestive. I want to take those blushing mauves and ochres, grays leaning toward green and blues hinting of lavender, and exaggerate them ever so slightly. The springtime palette brims with hidden potential, leaving me feeling both giddy with possibilities and frustrated that I don’t have more time to paint.
So, I draw. In this case, the shadows of the trees were especially intriguing. Curiously, they were only visible on the road, not on the grassy mounds along the road, damp and wilted after the recently-melted snow. The shadows not only suggest light, but also lend a sense of space.
Pencil drawing is an opportunity to play with gradients and contrast. My preference is to do most of the drawing on site, then finish it later at home. Why? Because it’s important to wean oneself from the subject and bring the image to completion as a work of art on its own terms, more than just a representation of something else. That means adjusting the contrast: darkening certain shapes, adding more texture to others, differentiating the gradients of the two distant ridges. Quickly my pencil traveled around the paper, its scratching sound converting into lines. There’s a sense in which all art is motion and time converted into form. Thus I pondered as I sat on the side of the road, scribbling away.
As I work, the subject becomes familiar to me, and I begin to feel a certain affection for it, a sense of intimacy with this patch of land that stretched before me. Finally I stood up and brushed the dead leaves off my legs. Then I kept on walking down that road, around the curve and out of sight, disappearing into my drawing.
A good week and Happy Spring to all!
D Yael Bernhard
http://dyaelbernhard.com
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