Category Archives: Making Art

Pen & Ink sketch 

I was fresh out of the University of Georgia and trying to make a buck or two while the future figured out what it was going to do with me. In a quixotic attempt to survive as a freelance commercial artist, I’d done a drawing for a guy who was trying to talk another guy into building a greenhouse. It was an architectural rendering of sorts for which, if my memory is correct, I was paid in beer. Sort of gives you an idea of how things were going at that point. However, as fate would have it, that drawing was seen by two other guys who ran a stereo shop. They approached me about doing some pen & ink drawings for a new sales flyer. The previous ones had been done by someone with a pretty good pen & ink technique, but he had moved away, disappeared, vanished. Things like that just happen in a college town. So the owners showed me some of his work and asked me if I could draw like that. “Sure; how many do you want?” I said, and we struck a deal. I’d make a couple of drawings and they would decide if I got the rest of the job. Either way, I got paid for the trial run—and not in beer. It was a good deal for everyone.

But, of course, I was lying.

It isn’t easy to get ahead when you’re young and short on experience. Sometimes, a certain mangling of the truth is necessary because the questions you get asked are usually wrong. They ask if you know how to do something. They should ask if you can learn how to do it. I like to think I wasn’t lying so much as re-imagining their question. In the years since, through several professional reincarnations, I’ve learned an important truth. Most jobs don’t require much more than a willingness on someone’s part to do them. I suppose I’d want a surgeon to be telling the truth about medical school, and an airline pilot shouldn’t try on-the-job training, but most jobs? Hell, you just fake it for a few days until you get the hang of it, and you’re in. Management provides almost limitless opportunities for this approach. In the case at hand, the truth was I didn’t have any pen & ink technique. And the truth wasn’t going to get me the job.

I started the whole project from scratch. I went out and bought a pen, some nibs, ink, and a type of paper a friend recommended. I had some of the drawings made by my predecessor that the stereo guys had left with me, so I sat down in my apartment and began to draw various objects in the style of the sales flyer.

As I worked, I noticed some things about the other guy’s drawings. They were fairly large, larger than they would be when reproduced. Reduction in size tends to hide small errors during publication. Though he didn’t get carried away with it, he wasn’t afraid to correct his work now and then with Wite-Out. Finally, he kept his drawings simple and uncluttered by unnecessary detail. His work was of a Sgt. Joe Friday, “Just the facts, ma’am” approach.

After a few days of practice, the time came to show my possible employers what I could do. The stereo guys gave me a desk in an office above their shop, brought in a turntable and a tape deck (that dates the story, doesn’t it?), and I made ink drawings of them. At the end of the day, the owners had two drawings, and I had a job.

I worked off and on for a couple of weeks on the drawings, and they were happy, and I was happy. Recently, going through an old moth-eaten portfolio, I found some of those drawings. I make no claims for them other than I got paid, and naturally, they aren’t at all like what I do today.

I tell you this little story because there were unintended consequences. The stereo guys ended up hiring me to sell equipment for them, which meant a steady paycheck for a while. Much more important, over those few weeks, I fell in love with pen & ink. I’ve been working in that medium, usually on my own time, ever since. I never tire of its dramatic tonalities and the discipline the pen requires. It’s what I imagine acting would be like with a minimalist set design or singing a cappella. And, of course, when you show your drawings in a gallery, there’s no using Wite-Out.

The shop owners later told me that they had approached another artist to do the drawings before they came to me. This artist said she would send around some work for them to review. A week or so later, they got a drawing of a nude woman lying next to a stereo speaker, her legs spread, with musical notes coming from her vagina. When they told me that, I didn’t know quite what to say. I suppose if you’ve re-imagined the truth to get a job, it helps that the competition has traumatized the buyers hers.

But things like that just happen in a college town.

Copyright James Craig Tucker

I like making pen & ink drawings.  I fell in love with pen & ink a long time ago and can’t see giving it up any time soon.  You can find the story of my early days working in pen & ink elsewhere on this website in,  Things Like That Just Happen in a College Town. 

What follows in this essay is a description of how I went about making the ink drawing “The Wayfarer II”. To those who are not artists it may offer a chance to see what goes on prior to the presentation of the finished artwork on a gallery wall, rather like attending rehearsals for a play.  However, please don’t think mine is the only way, or even the best way, to go about the development process. It is my way and that’s all I can offer. I took photos periodically as I worked on the drawing, and those, along with an explanation of what is going on, should give some idea of how I proceed from idea to finished artwork.

To start, here are a few other examples of my work in this medium:

Gallery I of recent ink drawings

As an artist I tend to think in terms of tonality and have never been bothered by the lack of color in monochromatic artwork. Of course ink drawings need hardly be monochromatic. If color is what drives your world, inks are now made in a dizzying array of hues, but as for me, black ink against white paper is good enough to realize my goals for many subjects. Pen & ink is a simple medium, a challenging medium, and one that encourages a thoughtful approach to its limited means. When you add the subtle grays possible with ink wash drawing, the creative possibilities are near limitless.

As for me, black ink against white paper is good enough…

The pen & ink drawing I’ll be discussing has its origins as part of a series meant to evoke the loneliness of the traveler. I’ve traveled a good deal over the years, and it can be an emotionally solitary experience. People move about, boarding planes and trains, lost in their own private worlds, dwelling in a space apart. While in Montreal with my wife, Deb, we hiked (really it’s just a walk) to the top of Mont Royale where we found a large visitor pavilion. The October day was somewhat brisk, and we each got a cup of hot chocolate to take outside and drink while we enjoyed the view. As I waited on Deb to get her cup, I looked around the large building, likely constructed 70 or 80 years ago, and noticed small groups of people gathered at tables here and there, overwhelmed by the vast space. Struck by how much the place reminded me of an old train station, I snapped some quick photos before we went off to sit on the terrace with our warm drinks watching our fellow tourists puff their way up the pathway.

Reference photos for drawing

When we got home, I eventually went through the photos taken at the pavilion and selected a few to work with. None of them was well composed (my wife is the photographer in the family), but they all evoked for me a sense of the lonely, emptiness of a large train station.

Though the majority of the pieces planned for the “Wayfarer” series were to be smallish paper-based paintings, it just felt right to do this one in pen & ink. I can’t tell you why. Sometimes a subject just seems to call out for a certain treatment, and once you get that into your head, you just can’t see it any other way. I also made a decision early on to make the drawing relatively large, influenced, perhaps, by the space that inspired it.

Using elements from the photos, I made some quick compositional sketches. From these, I then worked up a preliminary drawing, something I don’t always do. There is often a great deal of charm in work done quickly without a lot of preplanning. However, this drawing would be too delicate in its tonal and compositional relationships to be approached that way. Work like this needs to be carefully thought out. Besides, my studio is a long way from Montreal, and I only have a few quickie photos to work from.

For other comments on the shaping of raw visual material into art, see: Frank Wilson’s Pasture

Here is my preliminary drawing.

Looking at this photo made from my sketchbook, you’ll notice lots of notes in the margins and even on the drawing itself. After I complete an acceptable preliminary drawing, I prop it up where I can see it and work on something else for a while. It takes time to see things objectively. Each day, as I move around the studio, the number of marginal notes grows as I notice little problems, consider alterations, or come up with improvements. Notes are better than changes to the drawing because they allow me to remember what I wanted to change without getting the preliminary all muddied up with corrections. And these notes are important, because I’ll be working from this preliminary realization of the subject as I do the final drawing.

The need for the fairly detailed study arises from other considerations as well. Since I’ll be using stark blacks in the foreground, the drawing needs to be satisfying. I don’t want the viewer’s eye to stop at one of the chairs and wonder if the drawing is correct or to get bogged down in a cluttered mass of lines. Further, there must be a good rhythm in the placement of the chairs so the viewer’s eye moves smoothly to the figure in the back (the star of our show). These are important issues, and the final drawing is not the place to figure any of them out. Granted, many of these considerations were dealt with in the compositional sketches that began the process, but they have now been realized in a semi-finished state that allows for a more thorough evaluation.

… the key to working with photos is to not work directly from photos.

I think the key to working with photos is to not work directly from photos. Art can be broadly defined as the communication of ideas or feelings by visual means. The problem with the camera is that the visual information it gives you still needs to be shaped and molded to the artist’s intent. When a photo achieves that state, it’s then art. That is why photographers are artists—they are capable of shaping the image both during the shoot and during editing, be that in the dark room or on a computer. But most photos (especially mine!) are just dumping grounds for visual information and must be used as the jumping off place to begin a piece of artwork. Preliminary drawings are where that editing process occurs for me. Elements need to be moved, or need to be cut, or need to be enhanced; in short, the visual material from the photo must be made to express my intentions. This mound of visual “facts” must be shaped to my goals. That’s why for me, poor quality photos are best to work from, because they force me away from imitation.

Above is the beginning of the piece. Since they are hard to see in the photo above, I’ll point out some of the differences between the preliminary drawing and the one in progress. In my early thinking, I had two groups of figures located at two different tables. However, by the time I made the preliminary drawing, I had reduced reduced this number to two people sitting at one table. Now I cut the less important figure out (note to new artists: improving composition almost always means cutting things out). Only the solitary traveler is left. The perspective has been subtly altered to further emphasize the empty chairs and the viewer’s distance from the figure. At this stage, the background is rather lighter than it is in the study and even lighter than it will be when I get finished, but I know that the chairs will be full strength black and I’ll have to balance the background with them, since I can’t do it the other way around. Lightening a large inked area is not practical, so I left enough tonal “wiggle room” to adjust it later. This approach also works with my intention to make the background shadows lighter and more nuanced in the final drawing.

And now the foreground chairs are added. The tonal axis of the drawing will lie between the black of these chairs and the seated figure. My goal is to have the viewer’s eye thrust into the scene, and I’m using several means toward this end. The tonal axis shoots straight back to the traveler, the main chairs line up toward him, and the white of the windows and the grays of the wall frame him. That sense of thrust is something the preliminary study needed enhancing. In order to better judge if that effect is coming off, I’ve propped a frame on the drawing to give me a better sense of the pictorial space.

The last key element in the composition, the seated traveler, is put in. This is the moment of truth. If the drawing works at this point I’ll finish it. Composition is the skeleton of any drawing or painting; it’s the foundation on which everything else rests. There are many things in an artwork that can be “fudged”, but if the composition, the elemental basis of the piece, is flawed, there’s not much help for it. Though much still needs to be done to this drawing, if it isn’t working at this point, I’ll rip it up and pour myself a whiskey. Maybe two. Tomorrow is another day.

However, I’m not unhappy with the drawing at this point, though there is still much work to be done. The shadows along the floor at the back wall have to be brought forward and softened. The old radiator behind the figure requires definition, and there are many small touches needed in the tables. There is also the matter of deepening the shadows on the back wall in order to bring that large area into a better tonal balance with the chairs.    Nevertheless, barring a really stupid decision on my part (and like all artists, I’ve had my share of those) the final drawing should be close to my intentions when I began it.

 

As in the preliminary drawing, I floated on a couple of watercolor washes, tinting the image to convey a sense of the cool autumnal light filtering through the large windows. Further, these washes set up one more juxtaposition—a warm/cool contrast of the red brown and the blue. The blue in this photo reads a bit stronger than is the case in the original but you should get a reasonable idea of the finished product.

So there it is. We’ve gone from hot chocolate in Montreal to a drawing made in Tennessee. And because I so like work done with pen & ink and in ink wash, I leave the reader with a gallery presenting a few more examples of the possibilities for this medium.

Copyright 2015  James Tucker

I was thirteen when I decided to become an international jewel thief. Like many criminal decisions, mine was made impulsively, and it involved a woman—Grace Kelly. The YMCA in my hometown showed old movies. During an hour and a half in the dark, watching Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, I discovered my future life. Grace Kelly and I would live in a chateau overlooking the Mediterranean. We would spend our days stealing jewels while engaging in witty banter. She would be my lover. We would be very sophisticated.

To Catch a Thief is still a great favorite of mine. It was a pleasant surprise when my youngest daughter, Molly, said that she had arranged for us to go to see it at the British Film Institute. The BFI is not as stodgy as the name might suggest. It offers a full bar and great seating. Molly and Liam, her husband, live in London and I was visiting in October of 2012. For the better part of a week, we had a wonderful arrangement. Each morning, Liam would bring me a cup of tea (so English!) just before he and Molly rushed off to work. The previous evening, we’d made plans about where to meet for dinner. Until then, I was entirely free. Having a ‘Tube’ pass and all of London to explore is like being given the keys to The Infinite Possibility Machine, something Douglas Adams might have thought up. 

If you are a serious traveler you know that you cannot get the measure of a city until you’ve walked it. With that in mind, and having decided to go to the Tate Modern and its environs, I took the Tube to Waterloo Bridge station and meandered my way along the Thames. Though it isn’t very far from Waterloo Bridge to the Tate, I intended to take my time managing the distance.

London weather is thought by outsiders to be primarily rainy. Londoners will tell you that this is not true. Its dominant characteristic is changeability—sun at ten o’clock, rain at noon, sun at two, strong wind at five, and more rain at seven. Being a prudent man, I carried an umbrella with me when I left the flat and had it ready when the sky opened up. It wasn’t much of an umbrella, just something Liam had picked up at Ikea–small and green with large polka dots (he has a sense of whimsy, does Liam). It proved hopelessly inadequate against a wind-driven torrent. Having lengthened my trip to the Tate by meandering, I now tried to shorten it with an energetic gallop.

I arrived at the Tate drenched and in a mood as foul as the weather. Entrance to the Tate is free, and I strode in, rode the escalator up to the galleries, and began glaring at art. Nothing pleased. Nothing could. I gave up and went down to Turbine Hall. Turbine Hall is an immense room with concrete floors, a very high ceiling, and no furniture. The Tate Modern is housed in a former electrical generating plant, and Turbine Hall is where the turbines were once located. Makes sense. It is the place you pass through to get to the galleries. I decided to sit on the floor against a wall and sketch the people who were coming and going. The visitors to the museum were strongly backlit by a huge bank of windows. It was amazing how much could be told about people with only a silhouette to work from and with no reference to detail. So the day gave me its first gift—the sketches. They provided the visual idea for a number of paintings and drawings I’ve made since then.

But more was to come.

After a time I was shyly approached by a young woman who asked if she could talk with me. She assured me she was not a panhandler but rather an art student working on a project. Her English was good, though slightly accented. Sometimes, it had an American inflection. We talked a bit. Her name was Sandra. She was from the Ukraine and was a first-year art student. I envied her. She was clearly both exhilarated and frightened. Away from home, studying and living in London, her whole life lay before her. She would probably never again feel as alive as she did now. And the American-accented English? She had relatives in the States and spent summers there. She asked me to give her some items of little value that she might put into her art project. It was an assemblage she was creating from objects gathered from people she met. I gave her a few things, including some U.S. coins I had in my pocket. She asked if she could return the quarter and instead take a dime and a penny as they might work better visually. She was definitely an artist.

As we were talking, a man standing in the middle of the hall began to sing in a kind of melodic chant. There are crazies everywhere, I thought, and I tried to take no notice. But then another person started. And another. And another. Sandra leaned back against the wall next to me as we watched. The lights were dimming and brightening as more and more people, men and women, joined the chant. Flash mob? After a few minutes 50 or so people spaced at different parts of the hall were chanting together. Then they began, one by one, to fall silent and leave. Finally, only the man who’d begun was left. The lights darkened, and then he, too, was gone. Sandra rose, thanking me, saying she needed to find others willing to participate in her project.

She was only gone a moment when a man in his 40s sat down next to me. He immediately began talking in a rapid stream of words about how he lived on a Narrow Boat, a very small Narrow Boat because it was only twenty-six feet long, and his room was a space that was six feet by twelve feet. He had many friends and felt he was very rich and happy, though he had little money.  Yes, he’d come to London to find success. He had owned things and lived well, but now all that was gone, no longer a burden, and he was happy. He had the things that counted. I tried to ask him questions, but he talked past them. Finally, he shook my hand, thanked me for listening, and walked away.

He joined people who were streaming into the hall. More and more arrived, and they began walking about the hall, walking quickly but randomly, almost running into each other at times, then veering off at the last second. Little by little they began to coalesce, to form units and walk in patterns. Several times people walked right at me only to turn just short of a collision. The whole hall seemed alive with moving bodies. The lights rose and fell. The manic movement continued until their numbers began to dwindle. Like the chanters, they were soon gone.

Suddenly, a woman in her twenties dropped to her knees in front of me. Like the man before her, she launched into a breathless monologue about herself. When she was a girl she used to visit her grandmother in Northumberland. Her grandmother lived in a large, drafty house. It was always cold no matter what time of year she went to stay. The worst of it was that the kids had to sleep in this room that was colder than the rest of the house. It was so cold it was called “Siberia”. She used to call it that, even though she didn’t know what Siberia was. The comforters were old, lumpy, and heavy, but it was okay because the mattresses were feather mattresses. The weight of the comforter pressed her small body into the softness of the mattress and she felt very warm and safe and wonderful. I begged her to tell me what was going on. She ignored my request several times, but as she rose to go, she whispered that it was a performance piece called “These Associations” by an artist named Tino Sehgal.   These Associations

I had been sitting on the concrete floor so long my butt was numb, and my legs were wobbly as I stood to go back into the gallery. I was feeling both at peace and exhilarated with what I’d experienced. From the gallery, I could hear the chanting begin again. This time, it was slower and more melodic. I was really not in the mood for visual art, so I went to one of the balconies that overlook Turbine Hall and watched the performers begin once again to move about the hall. The intricacies of their pattern were more clearly apparent from above. I had dismissed performance art prior to that day, but that is no longer the case. My thoughts often turn to what I experienced and my feelings as I remember them. I’ve thought much about the different implications of Sehgal’s performance piece and my experience as an unwitting participant.

The evening with Molly and Liam continued the enchantment that began at the Tate. We dined at Wahaca, a restaurant housed in conjoined shipping containers, which offers South American-inspired cuisine. One of the joys of staying in London with Molly and Liam is that they know of such places, places I could never find on my own. And, of course, Molly had chosen her film shrewdly. To Catch a Thief worked its magic on me as it always does. I must confess my life as a jewel thief had never worked out. Many years ago, I came to grips with the fact that Grace Kelly would never throw herself into the arms of a thirteen-year-old boy, no matter how much jewelry he stole.

PS: Sandra emailed me photos of her finished project. She did a fine job.

Copyright James Tucker 

“Come sit in with me, Fiddle Player,” says the singer as she takes a pull on her beer. A tall young man with a short cropped sandy beard turns his attention from the blonde in the loose-fitting green dress to the woman who has just finished the first song of her second set. She tried to get his attention before she went on, but that time, the charms of the blonde won out. This time, he ambles over to his instrument and begins a quick tuning.

“Fiddle Player? You don’t know my name, do you?” he says.

“Didn’t catch it. Guess it’s like Billy Joel’s Piano Man, only you’re the Fiddle Player.”

“Fiddle Player, huh? Guess I’ve been called worse.”

She tells him she’s going to cover Springsteen’s ‘Main Street,’ which he acknowledges with a simple nod. After the first lines of the song he begins playing quietly, ambiguously, letting her set things up. She does the song far more slowly and melodically than Springsteen. The approach works. She’s a decent guitar player and her voice is pleasant and strong, low in register, rough enough to work with the lyrics. The fiddle player begins taking a more prominent role, still backing her, not trying to take over the song, his sound contrasting well with her voice. Their collaboration is effective, and both musicians seem pleased with the result. The applause is genuine. They do another song before the singer returns to her seat, and Fiddle Player returns to his blonde. A heavy-set man wearing shorts and a ball cap tucked tight on his head takes her place. He begins a song he’s written as a new beer arrives at my table. Later, a poet reads his work accompanied by a guy on a bongo drum. As the waiter said, “It’s all talent–some polished and some raw.”

Wednesday is open mike night at Dave’s Modern Tavern, or Modern Dave’s as we locals call it here in Monteagle, TN. I don’t know where the ‘modern’ part came from, but there is an atomic symbol on the sign outside, the one with electrons whizzing around a nucleus, that was common in the 1950s. In the front, there is a proper restaurant, and in the back a bar with an open deck. It’s a good bar, relaxed, well stocked, easy going. Something approaching 160 kinds of beer are available if you’re feeling adventurous. Modern Dave’s serves the best burger around. The place is a breeding ground for good times and the perfect location for an open mike night.

So what has all this to do with art? Quite a lot, actually. In a world increasingly given to passive entertainment, the people who take turns at the mike in places like Dave’s are heroes. They are there to perform, to share themselves with others, to try—either with newly written material or with new interpretations of other’s work—to offer both entertainment and insights into our common life. And they do it for us and the music itself. No one is waiting for the famous Nashville producer to walk through the door. They play for free, even paying for their own drinks. They play for the love of their art.

Graffiti, a gallery where I show my artwork, has a reception on the first Friday of the month. Naturally, there is always new art on display, but just as important, various performers from a theater group, Wide Open Floor, come to entertain before they go on to their show at Barking Legs Theater. They, too, perform for free and are a mixed lot. We’ve had belly dancers, poets, singer/ songwriters, and modern interpretive dancers, to name but a few. Some are brilliant, and some need work. I love them all.

Thanks to photographic reproduction and audio recording, the excellent has become the enemy of the good. The talented amateur is seen less and less frequently as the many watch the highly touted few. A hundred years ago, it was common for young women to learn to paint in watercolor, and many developed a high level of skill. People played instruments with greater or lesser ability so that they might entertain each other. Now, most of us play the stereo as our instrument of choice. I shouldn’t like to give up my own sound system to make a point, but too many of us have become passive watchers and listeners. We ask ourselves, why compose music if you aren’t Mozart? Why form a band if you can’t be the Rolling Stones, and why write songs if you’re not Willie Nelson?

It’s a question any artist, regardless of their medium, eventually faces. It’s not easy becoming proficient, and it seems that no matter what one attempts, there is someone else who is, or was, superlative in the field and whose work utterly dwarfs one’s own attempts. I will never have the facility as a painter that John Singer Sargent possessed, nor Rembrandt’s depth of soul, or the explosive color and line of John Marin. This list could go on indefinitely, and it applies in different ways to everyone in all the arts. It begs the question: given the glorious achievements of the few, past and present, why even try?

Perhaps the answer can be found at Modern Dave’s and with the performers at Wide Open Floor. When people actively and honestly perform their respective arts they change as human beings. They think about things differently and with a different perspective. I can remember most vividly the people and places I’ve sketched and painted, even if the resulting work failed my expectations. It is easy to look at the world and see nothing, but that’s something that art does not allow. And there’s more. All art is social in its nature, requiring both a performer and an audience. In reaching out to people and asking them to share questions and perspectives, we change the nature of the way we relate to others. For art to be good we must see others as being of ourselves and part of our process. With good timing and a little luck, we might change or challenge how our viewers and listeners see their world—if only just a little. Every honest, heartfelt statement is fraught with possibility. Every statement has its own power, however imperfect it may seem to its creator.

In the words of Leonard Cohen,

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in….

Copyright James Craig Tucker

My friend Howard was a good copywriter in his day. He wrote for the leading ad agencies and won awards for his work. One evening, over a drink, he told me a story about a time he was on a set where they were shooting a commercial for agricultural products. The creative team used actors from Atlanta and real farm people as extras. As Howard looked on, the actors seemed hopelessly fake and the farm people very real, coming across as exactly what they were. Howard wondered if the smart thing might be to turn the whole presentation over to the farmers. Who would know better about the products or pitch them convincingly?

And then the cameras began to roll.

The actors turned into farmers, and the farmers turned into wooden caricatures of themselves. Howard said the transformation was startling. Watching the farmers, the actors quickly got the essence of how the farmers presented themselves. It was the actor’s gift to relay that impression to the camera. But the camera became the enemy of the farmers—its cold eye threatened them. They suppressed their personas. It is not easy to be who you really are when strangers might judge you.

I am always disappointed in my photographs. They never seem to say what I want or cause anyone to feel what I did when viewing the scene. Perhaps really great photographers can manage to capture all that, but even they don’t drink in reality unfiltered. I once watched a show about how Ansel Adams manipulated his prints in the darkroom to get his desired effects. The variety of images processed from the same plate was striking, and Adams worked well before our time of Photoshop. Adams bent ‘reality’ to conform to his vision and then presented the vision to us. We mistook it for fact. We should have taken it for art.

The goal in making art is revealed in the actor’s craft or in Adams’s careful work in the dark room. It is the process of compression and interpretation, eliminating the unnecessary, using the main lines of the thing to transform reality and create a coherent statement from an incoherent visual world. Reality is far too complex to put down unfiltered on a piece of paper or a canvas. The artist must make choices and focus on the essence of the scene before him. When well done, this triage does not diminish the result; it reveals a defined truth—a truth formerly concealed in complexity. To illustrate my point, I offer here a pen and ink drawing and a photograph. The drawing was not made from the photo; the photo was taken well after the drawing was done (this morning to be precise). Though the drawing might have been done in many different—the photo does not make my statement, the drawing does.

Frank Wilson’s Pasture– photo

“Frank Wilson’s Pasture” 9×24 Pen & Ink  Private collection

Copyright James Tucker

The following poem was written by one great American poet, W. S. Merwin, about his studies with another great American poet, John Berryman. Berryman was 14 years older than Merwin and was, despite his personal problems, a demanding and inspirational teacher. This poem says much about the creative process, its origins, its demands, and its fears. In selecting the photos I tried to find ones that showed them when they were younger, closer to the time in their lives when the interactions described in the poem took place, but the truth is that both men would have been younger still.

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

Copyright James Craig Tucker

 

‘A Strong Brown God’ is what T. S. Eliot called a river. No doubt he was right. Certainly, the Tennessee River plays a large part in my life, and so the Jackson Point flotilla is once again preparing to set out on the waters. Persistent rains slowed down preparation and maintenance this year, as did problems created by a half-hearted job of winterizing the boats last fall. Nevertheless, my 14-foot sailing skiff, Flower Ann, is almost ready—just a small sail repair remains.

The 18-foot motorboat Nocturne needs a bit more work. A more rational approach to stowage in the cuddy cabin is being built—the ‘just throw it over there’ method of storage proved inadequate—and some changes to the trailer are needed to make retrieval less of a chore. Nevertheless, the river awaits and soon we’ll get back to her.

I built both boats with the help of my stepson, Andrew, and with the patience of my wife, Deb. Any boat builder will tell you a wife’s patience is essential to boat building but often in short supply. Women don’t seem to grasp the necessity of letting house and garden go to hell while the build is under way, nor do they revel in detailed discussions of construction arcana. Fortunately, Deb’s patience has proved sufficient; each year we have one or more boats on the river. We even started a yacht club, The Jackson Point Yacht Club. It is so exclusive that we are the only members, but what we lack in membership we make up for in style. My son-in-law, Liam, created a nifty logo and gave us T-shirts that proudly display his design. We are trailer sailors. Our ‘yacht club’ is located 2000 feet above sea level on the Cumberland Plateau and at least 1000 feet above the nearest large body of water.

The two signal flags tell other boats “you are about to run aground”, which is a useful piece of information when approaching a mountain-based yacht club.

The two boats are an important adjunct to my studio work, and using them has influenced my approach to drawing and painting the river. That is why I prefer the word, “riverscape”, to describe these works. The view on the river is different from that seen from the shore. From the boat, you can see things that you can’t from land. More importantly, on the boat, you are part of the life, the feel, the rhythm of the river. Sailing or rowing the Flower Ann allows the river to predominate. A small boat moving quietly under sail gives the multitude of river sounds a presence they can’t have with a motor hammering away. When sailing, you come upon things quietly, and the river animals are not so quick to run away. I do own a small powered craft, the Nocturne, but by the standards here in Tennessee, she, with her 4hp outboard, barely qualifies as powered at all.

I much prefer this lack of power. In my world, slow is good. A bass boat with a 350hp outboard motor screams along at speeds that render the world but a momentary glimpse. River current means nothing, wind direction means nothing, and even distance, given the boat’s speed, means almost nothing. The screaming power of the boat demands that the river be its servant. It is a metaphor for humankind’s ruthless need to subordinate the environment.

Sailboats are slow, fragile, and subject to the forces around them. Sailing does not allow you to dominate the river and her forces. You must understand these forces because you must work with them. And working with them reinforces the notion that we are all only part of a very large web of environmental energies that we ignore at our peril.

As I said, sailboats are slow, and slow is an artist’s friend. I never find much subject matter driving around in my truck. Everything goes by too quickly. I like to move at the speed of my bike or my feet on land and at the speed of a sailboat on the river. I have spent days sailing upriver and drifting back down, letting the current do with the Flower Ann as it would. It often takes us places I might not have thought to go. Along the way, I make quick sketches, take photos, and sometimes anchor and do a more finished drawing or a small painting in gouache if time and light allow. Most of all, I soak up the sights, sounds, and feel of the river: T.S. Eliot’s “strong brown god.”

Above: a gouache done on the river.

Below: the oil painting, “Unsettled Day: The Shelby Rhinehart Bridge” based on it.

Copyright  James Tucker