Emily Nelligan is an inspirational artist – much like Gilbert Garcin, a surreal photographer whom I wrote about a few months – who has been drawing charcoal landscape drawings in Maine since 1944. Simply incredible. Only recognised now, after 60 years as a working artist, Nelligan’s beautiful and magical rendered shorelines and woods of Great Cranberry Island are a lesson in expressive draftsmanship and how to capture the essence of place with the simplest of materials. Charcoal. The art critic Hilton Kramer said this about her style:
She has somehow been able to wrest from this smudgy, powdery substance a ‘palette’ of so many blacks, grays and off-whites, so many different densities of light and shade, so many nocturnal nuances and daylight subtleties, so much oceanic movement and celestial drama, that one is indeed made to wonder if one has ever before fully understood the power and range of charcoal as a pictorial medium.
These are small drawings, often only 7 X 10 inches and with a history of drawing this one place, in charcoal, for nearly 70 years, must make Nelligan’s body of work one of the largest in American history. It is simply extraordinary. Nelligan grew up in the Depression era and spends every Summer and sometimes Autumn drawing this small island in Maine. By contrast her winters are spent in Northern Connecticut which never appears in her work – she says there isn’t enough sky. Rather it is the sea, mists and sky, with it’s changing tides and shifting light that appeals to her sense of soul, heart, feeling and emotion. A small isolated island that has been slowly revealing itself to her for over 70 years. In an essay by Maureen Mullarkey entitled, ‘Transcendent Imagination’ she says the following about Nelligan’s drawings:
Throughout her creative life, Nelligan has used only charcoal and an eraser on whatever paper was at hand. Her spare means have yielded an extraordinary body of work that is more than the Maine landscape that prompts its imagery. Here are elegant distillations of rocks, eddying pools along the coastline, the shifting textures of sea and sky, the temper of a day’s weather. The immensities of nature in their detail is recognizable yet, at the same time, refined—etherized— to a point close to abstraction. Her shimmering atmospheric light suggests the light of creation. She comes as close as any modern can to the medieval embrace of light as a means for experiencing the presence of God. Or, as the nineteenth century preferred to call it, the Sublime.
Go have a look at more. If you want to learn something about landscape drawing and the use of charcoal then study Emily Nelligan.