ART
**For Recent Events, see the Photography/Art Main Page**
From earliest childhood, I have loved to draw. Lacking any training, I never pursued it with any direction, but over the years, I have drawn on a regular basis -- especially in the margins of school notebooks, when sometimes looking back at them, I find whole pages are filled with figures, interleaved between those pages where I actually took notes about whatever lecture was going on at the time!
Encouraged by the revival of my interest in photography over last few years, a return to this lifelong fascination with drawing seemed a natural development, though my first attempts at producing anything with pen, pencil, or brush were disappointing. Then I suddenly realized that during the 30 years I had been teaching, the drawing & painting tools I had had most practice with were those included in presentation software such as Powerpoint -- which I had used over and over again to create color slides for use in classes and research presentations, handouts for meetings and teaching, and large posters for conferences.
All the pieces included on this page were produced using the draw/paint tools in Powerpoint. These are some of my first experiments in using those tools to explore the same things I have always enjoyed in photography -- celebrating the beauty and facts of the natural world. In fact, among my first drawings done in this way was a set created in response to an invitation to participate in a marvelous show called "Pollinators of the World" organized here in Nacogdoches by two professors at Stephen F. Austin State University -- Charlie Jones, who in addition to being a master printmaker and fiddle/banjo musician, is also the Director of the internationally-known LaNana Creek Press; and David Kulhavy, Lacy H. Hunt Professor of Landscape Ecology and Entomology in the Environmental Science Division of the SFA's Arthur Temple College of Forestry & Agriculture. The show involved artists from around the world, and was presented in the upstairs gallery at the Cole Art Center on Main Street, Nacogdoches, May 4 - 20, 2017. See the "Recent Events" section of the Photography/Art Main Page for photos of my 5 drawings as hung in the show. The title card is shown below, with a haiku for each drawing; and the corresponding drawings are on the right.
From earliest childhood, I have loved to draw. Lacking any training, I never pursued it with any direction, but over the years, I have drawn on a regular basis -- especially in the margins of school notebooks, when sometimes looking back at them, I find whole pages are filled with figures, interleaved between those pages where I actually took notes about whatever lecture was going on at the time!
Encouraged by the revival of my interest in photography over last few years, a return to this lifelong fascination with drawing seemed a natural development, though my first attempts at producing anything with pen, pencil, or brush were disappointing. Then I suddenly realized that during the 30 years I had been teaching, the drawing & painting tools I had had most practice with were those included in presentation software such as Powerpoint -- which I had used over and over again to create color slides for use in classes and research presentations, handouts for meetings and teaching, and large posters for conferences.
All the pieces included on this page were produced using the draw/paint tools in Powerpoint. These are some of my first experiments in using those tools to explore the same things I have always enjoyed in photography -- celebrating the beauty and facts of the natural world. In fact, among my first drawings done in this way was a set created in response to an invitation to participate in a marvelous show called "Pollinators of the World" organized here in Nacogdoches by two professors at Stephen F. Austin State University -- Charlie Jones, who in addition to being a master printmaker and fiddle/banjo musician, is also the Director of the internationally-known LaNana Creek Press; and David Kulhavy, Lacy H. Hunt Professor of Landscape Ecology and Entomology in the Environmental Science Division of the SFA's Arthur Temple College of Forestry & Agriculture. The show involved artists from around the world, and was presented in the upstairs gallery at the Cole Art Center on Main Street, Nacogdoches, May 4 - 20, 2017. See the "Recent Events" section of the Photography/Art Main Page for photos of my 5 drawings as hung in the show. The title card is shown below, with a haiku for each drawing; and the corresponding drawings are on the right.
A FLIGHT OF POLLINATORS
-- Judith Lauter
[continuous-line-drawing ensembles;
digital, printed with color inkjet on textured paper]
Butterflies and Blooms
Flores, colores, prepare
us for Mexico’s
winter of tangerine wings.
Beetles and Yucca
We fly, we climb up into
yucca’s white bells to
ring out the old hymns of spring.
Bats and Saguaro
Through black desert night, bats stream
like pollen, seeking
cactus crowns white as the moon.
Bees Dance the Great Sun/Flower/Hive
Sisters, calculate what I’m
dancing – sun, blooms, hive:
all winter long, this sweet food.
My husband Ken also wrote a poem, "Bees Dancing," for the show, which I illustrated with a fifth drawing.
Copyright © 2023 Judith L. Lauter
