Valley in August 1965

Curator: Immediately, I'm struck by the gestural intensity here. The monochromatic palette forces you to dive into its chaotic beauty, doesn't it? Editor: It does. "Valley in August," a drawing in ink by Nell Blaine, dating to 1965. There's a restless energy in her line work, something evocative of summer storms and humid stillness. It feels a bit overwhelming, actually, and so, it is a drawing! Curator: Indeed. It’s not so much about verisimilitude as it is about capturing an emotional response to nature. Looking at it, one cannot shake off all those associations that the "valley" can bring. It's nature depicted, as it relates with an inner experience of reality; a psychological one, to be more precise. Blaine, as you know, worked from nature directly, often after bouts of debilitating illness that, it seems, transformed her experience of reality. Editor: That explains the high-contrast palette in the way she captures the shadows. Despite being in grayscale, I feel the weight of humid air just hanging there. Like the brief respite just before the storm really breaks. And all that botanical illustration gives it an interesting spin. Not too clean and orderly. But there. Curator: Yes! Consider how Blaine consistently engaged with ideas of fragmentation and wholeness. The composition may seem frenetic, but she has arranged a symphony that comes together to depict, beyond landscape as a genre, this dialectic tension she had in mind, through the whole drawing. The valley as a whole and herself are in display, to some extent. It represents the "artist facing the world" to be concise, in her style. Editor: In short, the image evokes more than what we're supposed to "see" when someone tells us about a drawing portraying nature in abstraction. Curator: Absolutely, which goes beyond the immediate impression! Its restless energy is its strength. There's a whole history here. A dialogue between mind and world represented symbolically through landscape, ink and mark. Editor: True. What seems at first to be abstract scribbles turn into pathways that tell a fuller story the longer you contemplate them.