Taking a closer look with pencil and brush
By Ken Moore
Next time you take a woods walk, carry along a pencil and a little notebook or sketch pad. Wherever you pause along the way to take a closer look, make some quick sketches and written notes of what you see and how you feel. Pay attention to details like bud shapes, round or pointed, whether a leaf is dark or light green, perhaps a colorful beetle in the path.
A simple sketch with color notes jotted on the sides guides you if you want to add color when you return home.
Some of you are thinking you’re incapable of drawing and painting. Beware, there is art in everyone. We simply need to rediscover that childhood freedom and creativity that lurks buried within. Reflect on how we drew as children. Whether a tree or bird, we drew it. Then along came the well-meaning parent or other attending grown-up with an “Oh no, that’s not how a tree looks!†and therein was the end of our artistic expression, sometimes, sadly, for the rest of our lives.
Back in late September, North Carolina nature artist Robert Johnson
led a weekend class for a number of local outdoorsy types interested in keeping nature journals. Robert is like a contemporary Mark Catesby, except Robert does not have to rely on the harsh colonial travels on horseback through virgin territory. Robert makes long hiking and camping excursions into the wilds across America and from Alaska to New Zealand. In making his “nature notes,†he likes to “hike light†to “keep it simple!†He goes equipped only with a small sketch pad and a pencil and a little color chart of his own design. Back at camp, he sets up for the evening to add watercolors to his sketch notes, sometimes redrawing several pages to make larger ones representing an entire plant and animal community.
Going a step beyond Catesby’s colored sketches of almost 300 years earlier, Robert includes miniatures of the landscapes in which he discovers the subjects of his details. I can stand and contemplate a single one of his finished journal pages for many minutes and then want to go back again and again. Many of Robert’s works describe the wild nature of North Carolina. Thirty-two of them are on exhibit at the N.C. Botanical Garden through Dec. 21, and well worth a visit.
In September, students accompanying Robert at Mason Farm Biological Reserve were happy to discover new ways of looking, and with rediscovered childlike freedom made quick sketches and color notes, returning indoors to transform their notes into colored landscapes and details. No two were alike, and all were beautiful. Some of those folks had never set pencil or brush to paper.
Simple sketching is a useful way to focus your eyes and feelings on a landscape and details found there. Even you can do it. So on your next nature walk, take along a sketch pad and pencil, take that closer look, and draw from the found inner child – and don’t be critical of your work.
Make note; Robert Johnson will return to lead field sketching classes next spring at the Botanical Garden and next fall at the Museum of Natural Sciences.
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