“Beyond Words” Exhibition at the Currier Museum
This banner below stood at the entrance to my galleries in the “Beyond Words…” exhibition at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, from 16 June to 9 September, 2018. The Museum presented me with it at the end of the exhibition.
The image is of a hatchling spotted turtle on his or her nest-to-water journey, from a watercolor I did for my as yet unpublished children’s book, TURTLE’S JOURNEY.
I discuss the theme and history of this book proposal, in my Unpublished Works account. Sample text and art can be seen on our web site: https://www.carrollartgallery.com.
This exhibition featured, in the words of the Museum, the work of “three award-winning New Hampshire book artists.” The other two artists were Tomie de Paolo, renowned author-illustrator of children’s books, and Beth Krommes, an outstanding illustrator of children’s books.
In the following text and images I present and discuss a sampling of my art works from this marvelous exhibition. I cannot imagine that the art work I have produced for my five published books will ever be accorded a more splendid installation. I am indebted to curators Andrew Spahr; Samantha Cataldo; museum director Alan Chong; and museum staff for this installation, itself “beyond words”.
I would be happy to discuss acquisitions from this collection, as compilations or individual objects, with interested parties. A selection of original pieces from my book art will be reserved for my core archive collection.
I would also be open to discussing the possibility of having an exhibition of works from this exhibition and /or alternate drawings and watercolors from my books.
A selection of originals from the books, including a number offered for sale, can be seen in my Gallery of Art Produced to Illustrate My Five Books.
In the collection of images and texts below I present background information on my techniques, as well as some history of the object and ecological information on its subject.
Brook Trout in a Riffle – original watercolor from Trout Reflections.
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This is an example of my use of transparent watercolor. All the whites – lights on the water surface, and in the reticulate pattern of the trout for example, are illuminated from the white of the paper.
As with drawing deeper and deeper into darks to achieve variations in lights and darks in a pen and ink drawing, the watercolor must be developed by going around the lights with wash after wash of darker values of transparent color. The erasure in order to lighten an area available for a pencil drawing is not an option with transparent watercolor or pen and ink works.
To leave such effects as the bright spots and patterns on the trout’s body, and the waves of light on the surface of and beneath the water, one must avoid getting too dark too quickly.
Once the light is gone, it cannot be recovered. Some watercolorists do scratch the paper, but that generally does not achieve the same effect. Tempera and opaque whites cannot produce the same radiance.
I have been very fortunate in having observations of these most elusive fish, as there are wild native brook trout in the wood turtle streams I focus my studies on.
It goes badly for them, and the wood turtles – by attracting people to stream banks, bringing about removal of critical stream side cover, and other negative impacts – when a stream is stocked with hatchery raised native and non-native trout. I discuss this and the ecology of the brook trout in my book Trout Reflections, which was named the best non-fiction book of the year by The New Hampshire Writers’ Project in 1993.
Red Spotted Newts
During courtship pursuits these graceful swimmers often twist and turn in arabesque intertwinings, an aquatic ballet of sorts. These are the adult forms of the brilliant red-orange red efts that are found in many forest habitats and are especially prominent on moist to rainy autumn days.
The young are terrestrial, living on the forest floor for three or four years before migrating to a wide range of still-water wetlands and taking on the olive green coloration, and developing the broad, fin-like tails of adults. The bright red spots of the efts are retained as they mature.
Red-spotted newts must breed in water, and the young go through a metamorphosis akin to that of frogs and toads before taking up their terrestrial residency.
I commonly see the adults, and young on the verge of becoming adults, in the vernal pools and marshes in which I search for spotted and Blanding’s turtles.
Woodcock
These exceptionally well-camouflaged birds have a strong overlap in habitat use with wood turtles, such as alder and silky dogwood thickets and stands of quaking aspen and gray birch, with a heavy understory (grasses, ferns, sedges, etc.). I indicated an egg at the lower left of this female, who is on her nest.
On several occasions, in the course of my wood turtle searches, I have had the experience of all but stepping on a female who would not leave her nest as I approached. She is using her camouflage to disguise her nest, which is a shallow dish of leaves.
Sometimes – as in my drawing – the nesting woodcock arranges a loose weaving of grasses into the leaves. The nests and eggs themselves are well-camouflaged.
I have to think that there have been more than a few occasions in which I have passed on by, never detecting the bird. I can say that this was in part due to my being fixed on my wood turtle search image.
At times I shift that search image and scan for woodcocks. But unless I glimpse one on the move, peripherally, I fail to see them until they burst into their explosive flights. The first line of defense in the predatory world is to go unseen.
Wood turtles excel at this. Their second line of defense is their tooth-and-claw-resistant shells, into which they can withdraw. For woodcocks it is that sudden, wildly startling burst of flight.
Display case with hand-bound books
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In earlier times, Laurette and I had a long tradition of making hand bound books in which we could do watercolors, drawings, and collages. The one shown on the left, with writing and a winter sunset is as early as it gets, dating from my high school days, ca. 1956.
My high school art teacher, who at once became my intimate friend and mentor for life, and who was the main instrument in my choosing to the art school route rather than biology/ecology as my main post-high school path, taught us how to make hand bound books.
We could do whatever style and subject of art we wished in these. He encouraged us to combine writing with the visual art.
My keen interest in combining art and creative writing dated from my four years in his classroom. In fact, the book that would become YEAR OF THE TURTLE had its roots here. By the time I was sixteen I envisioned writing and illustrating a book that would be such a blend, and star the spotted turtle.
That book did not become a reality until its publication in 1991, when I was forty nine years old.
The book at the top, center, was bound in leather by Laurette. She made it for me to take on my sojourn in Italy, October-November 1979. The subject on this page was an oak branch I found on a stone pathway in Rome. Most of the pages feature studies done of and in Museums in Rome, Florence, Sienna, and Venice.
On the right is a page from a book I made in which I did winter twig and bud studies, in this case poison ivy. I discuss these and other books in my “Hand-Bound Books and Sketchbook” page.
Display case with sketchbook pages and notebooks
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The sheet on the left is from my Trout Sketchbook, in which I did studies as a reference for TROUT REFLECTIONS. These pencil and watercolor studies are from a native brook trout I caught for this purpose.
Unfortunately, unlike the case with turtles, I could not keep a trout to work from and then release it back to where it came from. Center, top, is a watercolor of a yearling American toad in one of my early field notebooks.
Below that is a Digs notebook showing a photo of a spotted turtle on the left and an identification drawing on the right. On the far right, too faint to be seen here, there are pencil studies of a hatchling spotted turtle on a page from my Swamp Sketchbook.
Arrangement of five pen and ink drawings
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From top left – Hatchling Painted Turtles Overwintering in Their Nest Chamber (Swampwalker’s Journal);
To the right – Reflections From the Brook in Tree Shadows (Following the Water);
Bottom left – Four Toed Salamanders Guarding Nest (Swampwaker’s Journal);
To the right – Spotted Turtle in Hibernation (Swampwalker’s Journal); far right- Spotted Salamander Congress (Swampwalker’s Journal).
The drawing of the salamander congress was one of three pen and ink drawings purchased from the exhibition by the Currier Museum for their permanent collection.
Display of watercolors I produced to illustrate my unpublished children’s book: Turtle’s Journey
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This book follows a hatchling spotted turtle from the time of her mother’s nesting to the hatchling’s emergence from the nest one hundred days later. She then takes up the nest- to-water migration that all hatchling turtles must make in order to find the right aquatic habitat in which its species can safely overwinter.
We follow the turtle as she makes her way through her native habitat until she locates the shrub swamp in which she will spend her first winter.
The images, left to right:
The hatchling dropping into a deer’s footprint in which she hides for the night
The hatchling on her journey; the hatchling in hibernation
The hatchling when she was digging her way out of the nest chamber
The mock-up for this book proposal is shown in the small display case.
Three Framed Works
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These three works show how beautifully framed and exhibited my objects were. From left to right: pen and ink drawing of a Gray Treefrog and Swamp Azalea (Swampwalker’s Journal); Brook Trout on Streambank, with Wild Cranberry (Trout Reflections); Spotted Sandpiper (unpublished).
Five of my book originals grouped on a wall
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From the left: Courtship Spotted Turtles. We have sold a great number of prints of this watercolor through shows that Laurette does, our studio gallery, and our web site. It is from The YEAR OF THE TURTLE
Spotted turtle Nesting in the Moonlight. We have also sold many prints of this image, a watercolor I produced for YEAR OF THE TURTLE.
Pen and ink drawing of a hatchling painted turtle breaking out of his eggshell. This happens underground, in the nest chamber. But in seasons when I did studies of nesting by spotted, wood, snapping, and painted turtles I would dig into a nest from which hatchlings had emerged to see if there were any failed eggs or hatchlings not yet out, and find individuals who were still in this process of opening the shell in which they had developed. These observations were as compelling as any I have had along my turtle trails.
Watercolor of a hatchling spotted turtle digging out from the nest… the first one out. Another of the major moments I have been fortunate to witness over the years.
And finally, a pen and ink drawing of a spotted turtle basking on a tussock sedge mound, an extremely familiar sight as I search for them, especially in the unusually large (three to four acres) vernal pool I call the Swale. I write about this unique habitat, so critical to the spotted and occasional Blanding’s turtles of the Digs, in several of my books.
This turtle shows the alertness of these keen-sighted turtles (as are all species). In this drawing the spotted turtle is looking back over his carapace, as though sensing an approach. In this they seem preternatural. They seem to know I am there without having seen me.
Three of my Tree Pathology Paintings and a Botanical work
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Over an eight year period from the mid seventies to early eighties I did several hundred watercolor paintings to illustrate the research of two USDA Forest Service tree pathologists. I discuss this era and the works in my archival section on this collaboration – “Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees (CODIT) – my most specifically scientific undertaking outside of my own research with turtles. On the top left is a rendering of varnish fungus on a hemlock tree.
The fruiting bodies do appear to be varnished; the cutaway shows the fungus invading the tree’s interior at the site of a dead branch. Below that is a concept rendering of a tree’s physical barriers, walls of specialized cells, by which the tree endeavors to contain decay that can follow wounding. To the right is a watercolor showing the succession of bacteria, fungi, and insects that invade a tree wound.
To the right is a marsh marigold I painted in 1971. In the seventies I produced a great number of studies of plants, drawings and watercolors. My subjects ranged from winter branches and buds to full-plant renderings. Most of these were native wildflowers and trees, but I also did numerous paintings of peonies and magnolias, often using the the latter two in my teaching of drawing and watercolor.
During these years I was also exhibited in a number of international botanical art shows. The Hunt Institute for Botanical Art and Illustration in Pittsburgh, PA, purchased two of my watercolors of winter branches and buds for their permanent collection. This put me in an archive with the likes of Redouté and Albrecht Dürer. This epoch is discussed in detail in my archive’s Botanical Art component (A compartment in process.)
Watercolors of Spotted Turtles and Red-Maple Leaves
We sell many prints of these two paintings as well as the others mentioned in this Currier collection. I often think that the spotted turtles have done far more good for me than I have for them. So common in my boyhood in Connecticut, now in great decline because of habitat loss and illegal as well as incidental collecting, they are emblematic in my life and art, with its history of joy and loss.
The top watercolor is actually entitled “Two spotted Turtles in a Migration Stream”. I follow their migrations in earliest spring, when they travel from where they have overwintered to their activity centers in vernal pools, marshes, and fens.
I have observed them at times moving closely together, as the seasonal timing, soon after the thaw, is the same for all. On occasion I have seen males in courtship mode, following (pursuing) females, while on a migration journey.
Below that is a painting of three in an autumn pool. Their return migrations are spread out far more in time and space than those early spring movements. This watercolor is representative of my occasional observations of a group of them in autumn.
From about summer solstice into early July they begin to leave their activity centers such as vernal pools, even in years when these have not dried up, and go into hiding. They dig into the mud and roots of shrub swamps or other wetlands; or under fallen branches; leaf, sedge, and grass mats, in the upland areas bordering their aquatic habitats.
A late period of heavy rain, such as the fall-out from a tropical storm or hurricane, September through October, brings some forth again for a brief time. I resume my searches under these ambient scenarios.
My Five Published Books
Trout Reflections
Following the Water
Year of the Turtle
Self-Portrait With Turtles, A Memoir
Swampwalker’s Journal
Hand Bound Books
A Book of a Number of Hours
A Book of Winter Buds
A Book of Winter Branches
Borradores
Landscapes – January 20, 1978 – April 1978
Variations: February 1, 1967 – August 1, 1968
Visions: Drawings and Paintings: 1976 – 1988
Exhibitions
“Seldom Seen” Exhibition at the Davidow Center
“Beyond Words” Exhibition at the Currier Museum
Galleries
“Seldom Seen” Gallery
David’s Wildlife Studies Sketchbook
Virtual Gallery of Art Produced for My Five Books
“Regarding Women Regarding…” Introduction
Sketchbook Gallery: 4/1/1985 – 10/14/1987
Swamp Sketchbook
The Swamp Dialogs
Drawings and Watercolors Produced to Illustrate my Published Books
CODIT – Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees