Field Sketching and the Experience of Landscape

Janet Swailes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317401834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The act of field sketching allows us to experience the landscape first-hand – rather than reliance upon plans, maps and photographs at a distance, back in the studio. Aimed primarily at landscape architects, Janet Swailes takes the reader on a journey through the art of field sketching, providing guidance and tips to develop skills from those starting out on a design course, to those looking to improve their sketching.

Combining techniques from landscape architecture and the craft and sensibilities of arts practice, she invites us to experience sensations directly out in the field to enrich our work: to look closely at the effects of light and weather; understand the lie and shapes of the land through travel and walking; and to consider lines of sight from the inside out as well as outside in.

Full colour throughout with examples, checklists and case studies of other sketchers' methods, this is an inspirational book to encourage landscape architects to spend more time in the field and reconnect with the basics of design through drawing practice.

Part 1
Reviewing Field Sketching as a Contemporary Practice

CHAPTER 1 PRACTICE: FIELD SKETCHING

What is a field sketch?

Trends in field sketching practice

Field sketching and the experience of landscape

CHAPTER 2 PRACTICE: CHANGES IN HOW WE THINK ABOUT PERCEPTION

Introduction

Landscape and the legacy of the Picturesque

Perception: new thinking

Reflective practice: translating perception into knowledge-in-action

CHAPTER 3 PRACTICE: THEORY, IDEAS AND ARTS PRACTICE

Introduction

Walking

Drawing

Other influences on perception

Part 1
Introduction

Part 1 considers the practice of field sketching, as a traditional text, but with scope to recover a role to meet contemporary needs.

Chapter 1 introduces the notion of a sketch and the practice of field sketching in landscape architecture and art, with a brief background and history. Chapter 2 considers changes in how we think about perception and landscape experiences, with special reference to the Picturesque and Gibson’s Theory of Affordances. Chapter 3 provides more detailed background on perception, specifically in relation to fieldwork and drawing in the field, to inform the development of a field sketching technique, as set out in Part 2.

Chapter 1
Practice: Field sketching

What is a field sketch?

The notion of a sketch

A field sketch is a site-observed and hand-generated drawing, undertaken on location. Careful observational drawing in the field is one of the primary concerns of this book. However, field sketching as a practice extends beyond the drawing to our wider experience of the landscape, how we access that through fieldwork, how movement, temporal conditions, conversations, and other factors influence our perceptions.

Some of the reasons why people sketch are:

• to find the gist or essence of a subject, and as a way to capture an impression;
• as practice for drawing, particularly helpful in loosening up;
• to collect data for another purpose, such as a painting;
• to record nature, through either a more involved naturalist study, or by just catching a moment;
• as a visual diary, or memory jogger;
• for enjoyment, being outside in the elements, for relaxation and meditation, or the pleasure of caricature.

Sketching or drawing?

Are we sketching or drawing? The notion of a sketch implies speed, putting down some essential marks, capturing the moment. Sketchiness suggests imprecision, but can also indicate openness to interpretation, a tentative quality, and ambiguity.

Sketching is a term that has connotations of ‘amateur practice’ in fine art, arising from activities such as ‘sketching clubs’. Perhaps there is something of the playful, or spontaneous, rather than the serious in the derivation of the word, possibly derived from the Italian word schizzo, which means ‘to splash’ (Dutoit, 2008, p. 151). However, in landscape architecture, sketching has traditionally been regarded as a core professional skill, used in site observations. As a professional activity, field sketching is arguably becoming historic in all but the fine arts.

Sketching tends to be associated with black or tonal line work, although there are numerous painterly colourful examples. Line drawings on white paper are most obviously descriptive, but can have strong abstract qualities. The omission of information through the selective process of drawing allows a high degree of open interpretation. Line quality and weight are variable, through the mark-making potential of the wide selection of drawing instruments available: from the fixed qualities of pen nibs to more variable pencils, crayons and brushes.

For the purposes of this book, a field sketch is a locational drawing or field drawing, and field sketching as a term is used interchangeably with drawing in the field. There is no intended judgement of the value of sketching as being less serious compared to drawing per se. The scope of practice will extend to cover the range from quick sketches to involved studies and exploring the range of values is an important aim of the book.

Trends in field sketching practice

What practitioners say about sketching and sketchbooks

Landscape architects

Articles in ASLA, the journal of the American Society of Landscape Architects (2009, pp. 89–95) and Landscape, the journal of the UK Landscape Institute (2007, Life Lines feature) provide insights from landscape architectural practitioners on sketching and keeping a sketchbook. The articles reveal that these have become fringe activities rather than core skills for many landscape professionals. Sometimes sketching is regarded as a private indulgence, and at other times a powerful means of expressing and sharing ideas. The following excerpts capture the flavour:

• Generally, sketching is regarded as a quick drawing activity, with typical periods varying between sketchers: ‘10 seconds to 15 minutes. I haven’t the patience for anything longer … 20 to 30 minutes. … an excuse to slow down … I will stop for 10, 15, 20 minutes. At the most, I’ll spend two hours on a sketch, but very few take more than a couple of hours.’
• The process of sketching is organic; the sketch arising out of its circumstances and time available: ‘The elements themselves or those around me impose those limits … First you must see the critical elements to form and set those down on the page, then the second most critical, and so on … the sketch is what it is.’
• Issues of when to start, when to stop, how to keep motivated, letting go, are all concerns. The processes of movement through landscapes and drawing have their own dynamic and making a sketch becomes a period of attunement.

The dilemma between the potential for mark-making and convenience is described by Nick DeLorenzo:

I usually carry a small to medium-sized sketchbook, usually 5 by 7 or 8 by 10 inches, and a good quality paper … They have to either fit in my briefcase, in my bicycle panniers, or in a backpack. The most important thing is to have them with me when inspiration hits … I’ve tried over the years to make my materials as convenient as possible rather than having them slow me down … Sometimes I have actually used quill pens and India ink, which I like the best, but they are a little too clumsy to carry around … I also carry a small travel pack of watercolors, and sometimes I will add color to the sketches, either as a full watercolor or with no line work or using the watercolor to enhance the color elements of a pen and ink sketch.

(ASLA, 2009, April, pp. 94, 95)

Laurie Olin, Marc Treib, Thomas Oslund, and Kim Wilkie are all landscape architects for whom sketching and keeping sketchbooks have an important role. In spite of the development of computer-aided design and 3D visualisations, the sketchbook is still regarded as a valuable design tool. Laurie Olin has worked as a landscape architect for many years, but from a varied background in drawing practice. Of sketchbooks he says: ‘They impose certain limits of utility while affording a durable and portable locus for experimentation, recording, and note taking’ (Olin, 1996, n.p.). Olin points to the sketchbook work of Turner, Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn, in terms of the facilitation of continuous travel, and the sketchbooks of Picasso, ‘to record study after study while working through problems’ (ibid.).

Marc Treib sees the portable and sequential sketchbook format as being particularly useful as a part of drawing practice:

Beginning and experienced artists and designers maintain sketchbooks for a reason: drawing demands an immersion in a situation, drawing tests our observations, drawing within the confines of a sketchbook nudges us to take more care, to learn from the previous page and improve on the next one.

(Treib, 2008, pp. x–xi)

Writing in Landscape, American landscape architect, Thomas Oslund considers the sketchbook medium important to explore and test ideas beyond purely visual aspects:

I believe that design is the curator of our physical environment and drawing provides the tactility that is essential to the process of making a physical place. My sketchbook provides the knowledge base to ensure that the physical, tactile and spatial understanding are explored before anything I design is realised.

(Oslund, 2007, p. 19)

In the same article in Landscape, Kim Wilkie considers field sketching ‘a portable and immediate designer’s companion’ and as providing a personal space for observations:

As a designer, perhaps the most useful part of a sketchbook is the sense it gives you of intimacy with a place. For a moment you shut out the rest of the world, concentrate intensely on what you see, smell and feel, and then start to experiment with where the ideas might meander.

(Wilkie, 2007, p. 16)

In his Architectural Journeys, Antoine Predock (1995, p. 6) captures the spontaneity of sketching and travelling, a freedom of approach that infects later design work, but which at the outset is very much part of his encounter with particular places and the materials they offer for mark making:

Recording an experience via drawing embodies much more than an analytical intention … I was travelling on my motor-bike with only the bare essentials. I carried only a sketchbook and India ink, and used objects I found on the site as drawing tools, bird feathers or twigs or Popsicle sticks I sharpened with a knife. Whatever was there. I drew with.

(ibid., p. 6)

Artists

Sketching and keeping workbooks traditionally have been encouraged in art schools as a way of collecting and developing ideas and to reference material to work up in other mediums. Sketchbooks have been the medium of convenience for artists’ work while travelling, and are now a recognised form of artwork, exhibited and published for their own sake. Look at the work of landscape artists Francis Walker, Kate Downie and Kurt Jackson, who exhibit and publish sketchbook materials.

Jackson, who is noted for larger paintings made out of doors, as well as his sketchbooks, engages with contemporary culture, with vivid drawings and paintings:

The ‘feel’ of a sketchbook is something unique, both intimate and beautiful; the more so as it gets used, becoming full and complete – a visual diary – recording all those events, places, thoughts, ideas and times. I carry a sketchbook with me at all times.

(Jackson, 2004, p. 1)

Can we afford not to spend time gaining knowledge, understanding and the vision that field sketching can bring us? This is a question at the heart of this book, which places drawing alongside walking as its co-dependent activity of the field sketching technique. This book seeks to reconnect field sketching as a useful activity central to landscape-related practice.

Background and history

Observational drawing is an old practice, developed perhaps most keenly for scientific inquiry and persisting most obviously in the arts. Drawing outside has origins in the natural sciences, to record as part of exploration and research. Sketching to capture aesthetic qualities developed most prominently as part of the Picturesque movement, associated with travel, along with painting outside, en plein air.

Observational drawing in pursuit of understanding

Combining artistic and scientific approaches, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was the archetypal Renaissance Man. His studies of the River Arno, as with many of his drawings, represented observation from nature as the start of analysis and inquiry, in this case, for a river engineering scheme. Da Vinci is defined by his drawings and is considered an artist, but drawing was a technique common to his polymath activities, which also included anatomy, plant study and costume design.

In earlier times, documenting and presenting the discoveries of the New World, and investigations of the emerging sciences, drawing was part of the skills of travellers, naturalists, plant collectors, geologists and archaeologists. Jenny Uglow describes Captain Cook’s response to a kangaroo as, ‘Words would not do: for people to understand what a kangaroo was really like, they needed a picture’ (Uglow, 2006, pp. 155–6).

Map making

Early maps are notable for their depiction of qualitative aspects of the land through small pictorial symbols of landscape features. Denis Cosgrove (1999, pp. 110–11) recognises the importance of fieldwork in ‘fleshing out’ an abstract conception built up through maps and desk study. He considers the landscape constructions of the Renaissance, such as those by Danti Liguria and Cristoforo Sorte, which addressed both...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Reviewing Field Sketching as a Contemporary Practice
• 1 Practice: Field sketching
• 2 Practice: Changes in how we think about perception
• 3 Practice: Theory, ideas and arts practice
• Part 2 Developing the Technique of Field Sketching
• 4 Technique: Towards an integrated visual and experiential approach
• 5 Technique: Fieldwork and field notation 1
• 6 Technique: Drawing in the field 1
• Part 3 Core Skills
• 7 Core skills: Fieldwork and field notation 2
• 8 Core skills: Drawing in the field 2
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index