Gavin Snider paints the ‘Genius Loci’; the drawings of Rick Barton; Explorers’ Sketchbooks

Hello from Seattle!

Your newsletter celebrating great urban sketching and reportage is here again.

In today’s issue:

• An artist: The “Genius Loci” of Gavin Snider’s watercolor paintings
• An exhibit: The drawings of Rick Barton at The Morgan Library & Museum
• A book: “Explorers’ Sketchbooks, The Art of Discovery and Adventure”

Enjoy!

The “Genius Loci” of Gavin Snider’s watercolor paintings

The colorful watercolors of Gavin Snider, a Brooklyn-based artist, architect, and muralist, have a sophisticated graphic quality that has captivated me for a while. They feel fresh and relaxed, something difficult to achieve when you draw on the spot.

There’s something else I really appreciate about Snider’s work. He writes about the moments he paints, giving us behind-the-scene descriptions of things we couldn’t know just by looking at the artwork. Here’s why he feels compelled to write:

“For me, painting is all about creating an experience through observation and attention. 

The writing is a further document of that experience. I want to capture the things that don’t make it into the painting, the sounds, the smells, the conversations. 

In architecture school we learned the term Genius Loci, or the spirit of a place. I use my writing to attempt to describe that spirit.” 

Snider takes commissions and sells prints of his work.

My favorite pieces are those filled with humans amid the urban landscape: a bird’s eye view of commuters at a subway station; the summer crowd at Jardin du Luxemburg in Paris; or that lively take of the Rocky Steps in Philadelphia.

The drawings of Rick Barton

Like current urban sketchers, Rick Barton (1928-1992) liked to draw things close to him: his room; people at coffee shops; interesting architecture; places where he traveled.

He did it directly in pen and ink, with continuous lines that painted an intimate portrayal of his everyday life.

Thanks to the sleuth work of Rachel Federman, a curator at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, Barton’s never-seen work can now be appreciated in a exhibit titled “Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton.”

The show is only open until Sept. 11, so hurry up to go see it (and report back!) if you are in New York or nearby. The rest of us can get a taste of it from home browsing through this wonderful overview of the exhibit.

• Listen to Federman talk about the exhibit in this video.
• Read an article about the exhibit by Linda Yablonsky in The Art Newspaper.

Explorers’ Sketchbooks

After being on my shortlist for a while, I finally picked up a copy of “Explorers’ Sketchbooks, The Art of Discovery and Adventure” (Chronicle Books, 2017, $40) the other day at Village Books in Bellingham, Washington.

The 320-page hardbound tome is a who’s who of artists-explorers who traveled the world —often as part of military or scientific expeditions in the 19th century— and recorded what they saw in their sketchbooks.

Most I have never heard of, like Swedish geographer Sven Hedin, who painted desert scenes in China and snowy landscapes in Tibet. Or Amelia Edwards, a novelist and journalist who sketched her way through Egypt and became an expert in the region.

I’m enjoying reading the profiles of the 70 artists featured. It’s interesting to learn about this golden age of drawing as a documentary art form and its leading practitioners.