BY LESLIE REGO
My New Year’s resolution is easy: get out and draw! No matter how often I hike and sketch, I always feel like I could have done more. So every year I renew my pledge to take (and use!) pencil and paper during my hours spent in the field.
Last year I resolved to draw more in the wintertime, braving the cold. I did pretty well, drawing snow scenes and delving into fallen snow on pine branches. This year I am going to follow the advice of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), an American artist whose drawings I adore. He has several beliefs I find illuminating. Wyeth said, “It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment but not a frozen moment.”
Life is composed of many many moments. If we try to capture them all, it becomes a frustrating, impossible task. My winter drawing last season taught me to be quick—keep it simple, get the story, and don’t get bogged down in too much detail. Wyeth said, “When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.”
Winter drawing forces me to focus on the story… even have an inkling of it ahead of time. Some fast lines, a few big shapes, and then rely on memory to complete the image. Frozen hands taught me this quickly.
Andrew Wyeth also commented, “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”
The winter world is full of spare lines. Withered phantoms of plants poke their heads through snowscapes. Contours are hidden beneath a frozen world. Information that is plentiful in the summertime is left out. The sparseness allows the artist to fill in, to let the imagination run freely.
Wyeth felt that “if you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtler joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.”
Winter drawing does not give me time to get analytical. It allows for first emotion, for a direct application, and then get inside and get warm by the fireplace.
And, finally, Andrew Wyeth maintained that “most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly, I find that quite boring. For me, it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.”
This will be my fourth year writing Sketchbook Hiking. I have written almost 200 articles! Each article focuses on our natural surroundings and includes a sketch. Every season I explore the forests, the trails, the mountains, the snow, the lakes, the streams, and the wildlife in our area. I can attest to Wyeth’s statement that it is more exciting to find fresh meaning in the familiar.
Leslie Rego is an Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist, artist and Blaine County resident. To view more of Rego’s art, visit leslierego.com.