The Landscape of Painting

The sketchbooks of Fabrice Moireau. Oh, and mine too.

On a trip to Mexico, I took along only a sketchbook, a brown and a blue Pilot water-soluble marker and a watercolor brush. I had discovered that if I did a line drawing with the markers, then I could go back with water and a brush and make washes out of the lines. It was a very simple and lightweight solution, and it gave me a chance to practice my Spanish as well, which I’d been studying for a few months at that point. I didn’t want to spend more than 15-20 minutes per drawing.

Mexican sketchbook 1 | Stephen Springer Davis

The purpose of the visit was not only to vacation but it was also the first of four trips to Mexico my wife, Nina, made to see if we could figure out how to move there. This was in the year after 9/11, when both of our freelance businesses were in shambles. Moving to Mexico seemed like the only way to be able to survive financially in those very rough times. In the end we decided not to move to Mexico, despite having loved the places we visited, but I do have the only sketchbooks I’ve ever done on vacation. On other trips I am more serious about creating artwork that I would put in shows. These little paintings were only for my own enjoyment.

Mexican sketchbook 2 | Stephen Springer Davis

Mexican sketchbook 3 | Stephen Springer Davis

Sometime after our trips to Mexico I was in the Philadelphia Borders, and I tripped over Paris sketchbook by Fabrice Moireau. Since I was getting ready for a trip to Maine at the time, I was thinking about doing another journal, but with nice little watercolors and some notes about the places I went. I wanted some inspiration, and to see how other artists treated this kind of thing. I still haven’t gotten over the beauty of Moireau’s paintings of Paris scenes.

Paris sketch 1 | Fabrice Moireau | Paris sketchbook

His precise and detail-filled, but still off-handedly casual perspective drawings amaze me. It’s not only the skill of the drawings, but the fact that they seem to have been drawn without correction. And these are really complex street scenes, often with crooked old buildings and streets that don’t intersect at ninety degrees. And then the artist paints over these drawings with lush and equally confident watercolors. My analysis is that M. Moireau must do these drawings/paintings at several times the size of their reproduction. I don’t see how else he can put in all the detail. I can stare at the pages of this book endlessly, in awe. If I were to take on the paintings of this book it would take me a decade to complete them.

I also own the Loire Valley sketchbook, which is equally lovely. I should point out that these books are not written by M. Moireau, so they are not his journals. He collaborates with different writers. There are also the Provence, Garden of Paris, and New York sketchbooks. This is a prodigious body of work.

Paris sketch 2 | Fabrice Moireau | Paris sketchbook

I ‘ve been so humbled by the sketchbooks of M. Moireau that I gave up the notion of doing more complex “sketches” on vacation. His work sets a standard that I could never rise to. But I’ll continue to do my little marker drawings. That I can handle. But I’ll still pull out his books and study them agog.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Influential artists, Watercolors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.