29 December, 2023.

It’s been over a month since I last updated my “daily” sketching journal. December is, as always, a crazed month with non-stop everything-else-but-art-making distractions. The two-week holiday break at the end of the month gives me a chance to reset, rethink, rewind, and relax, and to ignore all of those distractions.

We’ve been cooking and entertaining. Wrapping gifts and standing back while kids of all sizes and ages tore through that wrap to see what was inside. Picking up and washing dishes and figuring out which leftovers would get repurposed into a fresh meal. I needed to get the hell out of the house yesterday, and in spite of the cold I felt like a hike would be an appropriate way to reset. The trails aren’t long, but they feel a lot more remote than they actually are at Martha Lafite; I bundled up and headed east of my house to embrace the chill and the racket of massing starlings.

Once I’d hit a trail, I immediately began to see the possibilities for compositions. Winter reveals the bones of a place to me. Contrasts are more easily visible, while trees and brush and hills can be rendered as simple shapes. I love that about this time of year, and it’s refreshing to explore new ideas for representing the world around me. Those acrylic studies I’d been making in November felt like they’d run their course, and I needed to look at these places with a fresh pair of eyes.

So here I am, wandering the fields and woods, circling round ponds, pausing to reflect along a gushing creek, and finding those “fresh eyes.” Simple value studies help me to locate the geometry of a place. Distilling things down into four or five values allows me to figure out how to place shapes, and to see if there’s a visual path, a way to sketch a scene in a visually interesting way.

I’d be fibbing if I didn’t admit that I enjoy the energy and spontaneity of these quick value studies way more than “finished” pieces. One day I may have the courage to frame these, to be satisfied with the most immediate of reactions, without feeling the need to find justification by setting up an easel and canvas, and demonstrating skill by laboring over a highly rendered painting. Who knows? It could happen.

Maybe.

A part of me wants to take a great big, thick, black marker or chunk of charcoal or whatever, and do these quickly, immediately on a large sheet of paper.

But I remind myself that also defeats the purpose of “being there,” and I wonder what would be gained in the end. Scale interests me all the same, and I would love to explore these scribbles in a large format.

The other thought I have is to simply accept these sketches as they are: small, immediate responses to a time and place. Perhaps I’ll take the digital file and print them out on 24 x 24 inch paper, see if that satisfies this urge to “make big.” Otherwise, they feel great to me as intimate encounters. As book illustrations, perhaps.

I think that’s the point, really, of exploring outdoor places: to reset, rewind, rethink, and relax. Not necessarily to “do” anything at all, but simply to “be.”