Drawn to nature

Credit: V. CELMINS/ADAGP, PARIS

Drawing is central to the work of Latvian-born US artist Vija Celmins. Her haunting, monochrome depictions of limitless expanses of ocean, nocturnal skies and deserts lack a point of reference, such as the horizon, or a depth of field. Usually copied meticulously from photographs she has taken herself, each image takes months to draw. 'Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective', an exhibition originally shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California, from 28 January (http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/119), brings together 68 of Celmins' drawings made over a 40-year period.

In 1968, Celmins began using photographs of outer space to translate the idea of the night sky into an abstract composition, an approach she then adopted in her ocean drawings. “The sight of the waves miles out, their dutiful and frenetic solitude, their dull indifference to their fate,” mused novelist Colm Tóibín in his catalogue essay.

Celmins drew Untitled (Big Sea #1) (shown above) in 1969 using graphite on a sheet of paper covered with a light grey acrylic ground, a technique she favours to avoid digging her pencil into paper. By leaving a thin grey border around her images (not shown here), Celmins signals that her subjects are clearly defined objects and not fragmentary images. The subject matter is clearly her photograph, not an actual seascape. “I don't imagine the ocean and try to recreate a memory of it when I'm doing the art,” Celmins said in 1992. “I explore a surface through drawing it. The image gets controlled, compressed and transformed.”

Over time, Celmins' ocean drawings became denser and she created perspective by using thicker layers of graphite to darken the lower parts of her drawings. Repetition became more significant in her work, and she began producing series of similar images.

Credit: V. CELMINS/ADAGP, PARIS

In 1983, thinking she had exhausted drawing as her medium, Celmins returned to painting. But she began drawing again in 1994, using a different technique. She applied charcoal by hand directly onto paper, and used erasers to rub through the charcoal to create images by exposing the white surface of the paper.

The subjects of Celmins' latest series of drawings are delicate, light spider webs, shown against dark charcoal backgrounds. Web #1 (shown right) from 1998 conveys the translucent quality of a web in an image that has a sense of discovery and wonder. The series was inspired by a scientific publication, James Henry Emerton's 1902 book The Common Spiders of the United States. “If I wasn't an artist, I think I would have liked being a scientist,” said Celmins.