I have recently been taking a drawing seminar, and it has led me to look at a lot of drawings by masters of years past. I love seeing fully "modeled" drawings, don't get me wrong. But there is something especially exciting to me when a single line makes all the right moves. How can some artists say so much with so little?
Faithful readers know that one of my favorite artists is Nicolas de Staël. I'm illustrating this post with some of his drawings, in which a mere line creates an entire world. Interestingly, de Staël used a felt tipped pen to create many of these works. It just goes to show that sometimes great art can come from very humble materials! I can imagine de Staël sitting with a drawing pad and pen, and distilling the chaos of the world around him into a few tell-all lines.
It might appear as if these drawings were dashed off quickly or haphazardly. In fact, the opposite is true. As Nicholas Fox Weber as written: "With de Staël, even the shortest dash is the result of a conscious decision. It would not be there if the measure were not perfect, and if it did not fit as an essential in the overall scheme." I am also struck by the way de Staël uses the white (blank) space of the picture plane. The line may be the only visible mark, but it also defines the invisible shapes that we know are there. For example, in the first drawing above, the boat hulls sit in the top of the picture plane--and the space below them, though "blank", teems with the movement of the water.
The bouquet of flowers (shown just above) stopped me in my tracks the first time I saw it. And it sill makes me catch my breath. Oh, such clarity! Weber writes of a similar floral painting that de Staël "caught that bouquet of flowers as a mass of angles in space." And a great catch, at that. Hope you'll enjoy these drawings as much as I do.
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