River Portrait / River Laune

Drawing is as fundamental to the energy that makes us human as singing and dancing.
John Berger, Berger On Drawing

I wonder if one of the reasons so many children cease drawing as they grow up is that, with age, the world no longer astonishes us - we become accustomed to its wonder and uniqueness. Does this familiarity make us stop truly seeing?

Through drawing, we capture the very act of looking - a moment of attention and focus. We record the details of our reality. We can even bring something to life. There is magic in drawing. How often do children compensate for the absence of an object by drawing it? How many details they can notice and remember - even in something as small as a ladybug. We adults see only a round insect with black spots. I wonder if drawing isn’t a form that allows us to step outside ourselves and our habits for a moment, and see again for the first time. It can make us notice that there is also a tiny thorax, an even smaller head, eyes, and antennae ending in little clubs (something children don’t yet know, but they do see). We can let our imagination run wild and add a hat to the ladybug and create an entire story, just like the one my seven-year-old daughter once brought me with joy.

The act of drawing enables us to see the river we so often pass by without noticing anew. We begin to distinguish the incredible shapes it paints in front of our eyes. Reflecting the world around it, the river creates its own - gently rippling the image of our reality, rearranging it into patterns, lines, and swirls. It responds to the weather and the light, and with the colors available, it composes its own sketch. Sometimes it resembles curls of hair, like in Leonardo da Vinci’s exploratory drawings. Other times, it creates an energetic image - like the trembling lines in Vincent van Gogh’s sketches of sailboats.

I think drawing water is a wonderful exercise, because water is as elusive as time. We have to make a great effort to truly observe it, knowing from the start that capturing its image is destined to fail. Many times I have tried to memorize the shape of a single wave, only to have it blurred by the next one the moment I looked again*. What does it feel like to draw something we can’t hold onto? To follow something that constantly slips away? Perhaps it is precisely this process that is so fascinating. I would even say revelatory - possibly more interesting than the final sketch itself.

I thought that we could create a Portrait of the River Laune together.

I would like to invite you to make a drawing of the River Laune from observation - from any point in Killorglin or beyond - using a black gel pen or black marker on an A5 sheet of paper. Then, please bring it to the gallery and hang it on the wall. It is important to me that we all use similar materials as in this way each drawing will connect to the others.

It is not important whether you capture what we call resemblance. What does that even mean, when you remember that you yourself are mostly water? As Alok Jha wrote in The Water Book that perhaps water created us so it could appreciate itself. What’s important is that you stood in your chosen place and tried to capture something you saw. And you did so in your own unique way, at that particular moment, because you carry with you memories, dreams, emotions - all of which are reflected in that river too.

It doesn’t matter when you drew something last time. What matters is when you do it again.