Word: swanning
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...power of detailed synthesis was not the end of drawing, however, only the means. Leonardo could bring a steely exactitude and transparent freshness of observation to a botanical drawing, like the star-of-Bethlehem plant that he drew as a study for his lost painting of Leda and the swan. Yet the consciously serpentine wreathing of its leaves proclaims the image to be formed as much by style as by the impulse to "objective" description. The two work perfectly together. To see why, one may look at the most famous of his water studies, the image of water gushing from...
...Doig and Swan come to occupy the same mental space, Doig's book takes on the same fertility and resonating complexity of the rainforest ecosystem...
...fascination of the rainforest is that all flows into and out of all else; here I can sense how the Haidas, whom Swan went among in their own clouds of forest, could produce art in which creatures swim in and out of each other, the designs tumble, notch together, uncouple, compress, surge. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death...
...link subtly interconnected to the larger piece. The wit is quiet, the words understated and nuanced, homely yet precise and evocative. Intrigued, you may soon want to stay up late with the retiring, lumberjack-shirted fellow thumbing through browned pages in his patient, archivist's enthusiasm, joining him and Swan as another "winter brother...
...evokes the Northwest with such an intimate touch that we actually re-experience it. His words and thoughts are religiously down to earth. Nothing can be understood without knowing the land, hugging it, runnings one's fingers over it, as he does at the end when he locates a swan and the initials "JGS" which his "winter brother" had carved in the sandstone at Neah Bay. If he reads Swan's dairy about the place where the trail from Cape Alava to Lake Ozette crosses a stream he goes there and traces the exact footsteps, finding the exact place...