“Weather is the perfect natural phenomenon for the
scrutiny of the journal-keeper. It’s always happening, you don’t
have to go far to check on it, and you need no sophisticated
equipment to study it… Draw the various clouds and cloud
formations you see, paying particular attention to their volumes in
space, their lights and shadows…”
“There is nothing like the
feel of the tip of a reliable, familiar pen gliding over the paper
leaving a crisp trail.”
*Hannah Hinchman
DRAWING FROM
LIFE
At various workshops around the West each
year, Dubois, Wyo., artist Hannah Hinchman has helped hundreds of
people avoid that banal description of the natural world –
-interesting’ – while pushing them toward the particular: capturing
the precise words to describe the metallic green of a magpie’s
tail, the intense glow of the afternoon sun as it backlights the
flickering leaves of an aspen grove.
She’s after
a faithful rendering of place as it is experienced, she tells us,
with the quest always: “How do you recall the flavor of the
moment?” In her new, beautifully produced book, A Trail Through
Leaves: The Journal As a Path to Place, Hinchman shares her ideas
for living life more fully by faithfully recording it as it
happens, moment by moment.
Her advice is
deceptively simple: Avoid the trap of dead words, she says. “Keep a
firm grip on the real stuff, prickly, slimy or bony as it may be
… We’re awash in gutless speech.” But Hinchman isn’t after some
“perfect” rendering of a mountain stream or gnarled tree. What she
encourages is close attention. “Be willing to wallow in the colors,
shapes and surfaces for as long as your exuberance sustains you.”
About a decade ago, Hinchman started
experimenting with watercolor “event maps,” which trace a route
through a landscape as it is encountered. Everything is fair game
for this artist, who communicates ease and effortlessness in the
midst of a laser-like focus.
– Betsy
Marston
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Drawing from life.
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