Drawing from life

by Betsy Marston

"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


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