Return to this week's Bulletin

23 November 2001

Drawing on Nature

Cathy Johnson. The Sierra Club Guide to Sketching in Nature. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997. 228 pages.
ISBN 0-87156-932-9

 

Reviewed by Sheldon Greaves

 

 

Many years ago, before photographic equipment became small enough and cheap enough for anyone to take pictures, learning to sketch was something most educated people learned to do. Tourists frequently included a sketchbook and perhaps a paintbox of watercolors among their luggage to make visual records of their travels.

While I'll be the first to acknowledge that the ability to point and shoot a highly detailed visual record is a great thing, there is also something to be said for doing it the old fashioned way. It is a truism of learning that if you want to understand something, force yourself to write about it. By the same token, if you want to really see something, draw a picture of it. Just as writing is nature's way of demonstrating how slopping your thinking is, drawing is a marvelous exercise in observation. Even simple diagrams or line drawings can concisely summarize what you see in a way prose can never match.

The problem, of course, is that since drawing is not a necessity for most of us. In our schools, drawing is now part of the arts which (unjustifiably, in my view) are considered secondary to a good education. The practical upshot is that most of us suck at drawing what we see.

I have seen a large number of books designed to help the beginning artist draw from nature. Cathy Johnson's book is by far the best I have encountered both because of her approach to teaching sketching and painting, and because she approaches sketching as a tool for collecting data about the natural world.

The book begins with an excellent overview of the tools of the artist; pens, pencils, brushes, paper, erasers, etc. Johnson discusses all of them with a view towards their effects on the page, ease of use, and even how well they travel in a backpack.

She then moves on to basic techniques. Johnson demonstrates an understanding that the reader might find the business of learning to draw intimidating. I noticed that the drawings she uses to illustrate her book are good, but not so stunningly brilliant that the beginner will look at them, decide that they will never be able to draw like that and give up. However, I also noted that as one proceeds through the book, Johnson's drawings do seem to get better and better.

Johnson's instruction is pragmatic and easy to understand. She is not so much interested in helping you create great art, as she wants the reader to make a useful visual record with minimal effort. The emphasis is on simple shading, shadowing and line techniques that will create pleasing results without months of practice. Johnson also goes into not just drawing, but using watercolor and ink washes as part of a field sketching program. While this sounds cumbersome from a practical and logistical standpoint, it still seems to be a very useful tool for any naturalist to acquire.

That said, Johnson makes it clear that spending time with pencil, pen, or brush is essential to long term success. Clearly learning to draw and paint well takes time. Johnson's contribution is that she shows how todraw well enough to create satisfying field sketches. Obviously if your goal is a show at the Guggenheim, it will take a bit longer.

After some basic techniques are explained, we then move on to applying those techniques in different contexts; drawing trees, animals, landscapes, atmospheric phenomena, and so forth. Finally, she finishes with advice on how to care for and use your sketches as part of a larger program of nature observation, along with some reflections on how her artistic approach to observation has helped her learn about the natural world.

I highly recommend this book. I plan on personally attempting to internalize some of the skills taught here. Perhaps in a later article I hope to describe the results of that experiment.