Using drawing to answer the question: “What is this river?”
During the coronavirus restrictions, my husband and I have been taking our daily walk in a small local wood running along the bank of the River Tavy, one of the fastest rivers in England. The wood forms part of an abandoned railway line, hence it is straight and flat – but it’s also tranquil and little frequented.
I have been looking at the work of Professor Jem Southam who tried, by photographing the River Exe, to answer the question “What is a river?”. He soon decided it seemed “an impossible task…a quagmire of a problem…”*. I agreed, and so have limited my investigation to this one stretch of the Tavy. I wanted to find a way to capture the essence of this river in drawing.
Much like Jem Southam, I was not sure at the outset what form my final work would take, although I had some initial idea of a series of drawings. I knew I wanted to work mainly with ink, and to immerse myself in pushing the medium to see what could be achieved. I also wanted to develop my use of line and gesture to convey texture and form and to experiment with temporary marks.
The walk offered many distractions – damselflies, dippers, ducklings…. – but it became clear that the essentials of the river involved the water, banks and river-bed. Like Vija Celmins with her Ocean** drawings, I found myself fascinated by the water and its movement, wondering how to depict its infinite variation. I experimented with ways of conveying its character, both representational and also more abstract, doing many ink sketches on-site.
John Virtue, and David Hockney with his iPad drawings, had both recorded a landscape (and in Virtue’s case, a repeated walk***) through tessellated images, and I decided that a tessellated series might allow me to depict both the horizontal layering down through the water from the surface, with its reflections and movement patterns, to the river bed, but also the vertical layering experienced as one walked alongside the river and observed its different moods.
I needed a transparent support to be able to put this layering idea into practice, and experiments led me to do a series of drawings with ink, using a palette knife, into wet Mod Podge glue. The glue takes the ink, does its own thing with it, and sets to a transparent sheet with the ink embedded inside. I mounted the drawings individually on vertical perspex stands, tessellated one behind the next, so they can be looked through, and the viewer gets the feeling of passing through one drawing to the next, as if they were walking along the river.
A liquid medium into a liquid support to depict a liquid – the essence of the river.
*Jem Southam, ‘What is a River?’, unpublished essay, 2011, unpaginated
**Vija Celmins, “Ocean”, 1975, Tate
***John Virtue, “Landscape No.10”, ink, shellac, pencil and charcoal on paper, private, UK
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