Drawing Lessons

Drawing Yellowstone brings certain physical characteristics to the fore. Dead trees and liquid earth upend the landscape of the mind. Where you expect to see verdant growth you find bodies of animals chiseled from toppled trees, bleached white by the sun. The Snake River is littered with these bold white lines sloping against brown banks. We sit for hours drawing along this river. 

I lost control of my drawing when I could not assign a river bank to a particular line. I was drawing segments, not realizing the two banks paralleled but never intersected. An obvious conceptual understanding, but less so in linear terms. 

Leila flattens the view, compressed but articulated layers of space. In her abstraction the images play with shifting identities. Trees become leaves. Trunks go from dead to alive, black to white. She remarks on the capacity of drawing to move, to rove over a landscape. So different from photography, the drawing offers multiple vanishing points in one image. A collection of views.