Robert Genn's Twice Weekly Letter
Insight and inspiration for your artistic career.

Dear Artist,

Nowadays, with Satellite GPS and Google Maps, it's possible to virtually traverse the surface of our planet. Afghanistan, for example, reveals a feast of benign abstracts: patterns of desert, river, orchard, obscure caves and the rectilinear walls of farmyard and mosque up and down a ragged, mountainous terrain.

There's the undeniable joy of moving over a landscape--maybe it's the simple delight of simulating the flight of a bird. As well as guidance, a map gives a feeling of control, and maps can be counted on to return lively earthbound memories. You can cruise maps, and you can make marks on them.

For visual artists, an easily created mapbook is useful for planning trips and keeping track of creative events along the way. For this purpose, commercial or government maps need to be photocopied in black and white. I like to enlarge them a bit and assemble them in the order I want to cover the territory. At the top of the current clickback, we've illustrated a mapbook I use when working in Ireland.

Right now, I'm painting at the coastal village of Doagh on the Rosguill Peninsula in Donegal. I drove through here twenty years ago under black skies in rain unbeatable to wipers. At the time, I made a note of the place and wondered if I'd ever come back.

Marking maps while travelling makes a permanent position-finder and a spatial record of the routes taken. Using a variety of coloured markers, I note photo-locations and reference, views, paintings, mysteries, weather conditions and ideas generated. I'm not afraid to use words like "wonderful." Sometimes it's the only word you can find when you're high on the world.

Maps are a curious mixture of space and time. Many a wintry night I've taken my Irish mapbook to bed and cruised again these narrow roads. Many a night I've held again the black Guinness drawn from that pub over there. I'm remembering an old fellow, a regular and probably gone now, who asked what I did for a living and what I was doing at Doagh. Being coy, perhaps philosophical, and attempting to avoid heavy questioning, I told him I was marking maps.

"Odd sort of life," he told me.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." (Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings)

Esoterica: On that earlier trip, I had attempted to circumnavigate Ireland by car along the coastal roads. I wanted to get down to every coracle village I could mark. As you get older, you get more adept at moving less and loving more. Ten or so clicks a day are all you really need. Two or three set-ups does it, and even though the paintings may not always be as great as one might wish, there's the feeling of an evolved life, of beating back your demons. When the big trip comes to its end, this will have been paradise enough.

If you would like to read more information related to the above letter please visit the A treasured mapbook clickback


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