Drawing with Light

I have been telling people lately I am more of an artist than a photographer. Ben and I made a video about it in Vincentia recently and it’s also the subject of my editorial for the soon to be released Len’s Journal Volume 1 Issue 2. Yet I do wonder why I have held onto the ‘photographer’ label so long? My gallery in Katoomba squeezed in the word art in the logo. The Leonard Metcalf Art Gallery it proudly stated. That was in the year 2000. So I have probably been trying to shake it for a long time.

Yet, honestly it has taken years and years of hard work to shake off ‘photography’ as it is supposed to be. To find myself and work that speaks so uniquely to me.

I put down my paintbrush and pen a long time ago. More than half my life ago. The brushes were Kolinsky Sable, handmade from Siberian weasel tails, each cherished and cared for with exceptional love. They held watercolours beautifully enabling a very fine stroke just a hair thick to a gorgeous thick stroke laden with colour, all with one brush. I loved to paint in monochrome.

But really my true love was ink. Pen and ink. Sometimes I’d add a wash, though that was something I didn’t feel like I had mastered. I’d spend hours pouring over Japanese ink painting books to see if I could glean a little extra skill. It wasn’t so forthright in coming I must say.

I really loved drawing with pure Indian ink. A nib, or quil dipped in every few strokes. I even had the dream of being a cartoonist though I struggled to find my own unique characters. I actually did my school work experience in an animation studio.

It is why I minored in printmaking at art school, being able to play in monochromatic ink. Etchings and lithographs were my second home after the darkroom and bush with my camera. Printmaking was also an area of the art school where Mother Nature was celebrated rather than ridiculed.

So I hope you can feel my joy in creating these gorgeous trees that are so reminiscent of my youth as a draftsman. I love that they don’t look like photographs but do look like drawings made with ink. Perhaps they look like lithographs or etchings.

Learning to draw with light has been such a revelation. Photography means drawing with light, just in case you didn’t know. Photo = light and graphy = drawing.

Whilst I do love these, please don’t think they are going to dominate my work moving forward. They are just another dalliance and will go into a larger body of work on trees. Tusche Trees. Indian Ink. Hopefully I’ll amass enough for a book of them. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Tusche Trees, photographs and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2021