Jeannine Cook

As a child in East Africa, I spent endless hours in a darkroom with my photographer grandfather, watching black and white photographs appear, as if by magic, in developing trays.  Their monochromatic beauty ultimately contributed, I now realise, to my fascination with the drawing medium of silverpoint. Drawing with sterling silver is demanding.  The medium develops slowly, like a black and white photographic print. Its intensity of execution allows me to concentrate on the familiar. I reaffirm connections with my sense of place, with rhythms of tides and seasons, with light moving, changing, transforming everything.  For me, silverpoint is a subtle, quiet medium that provides a counterpoint to today’s high voltage world.  Perhaps that is not surprising, given that this medium, known generically as metalpoint, was born in the contemplative atmosphere of 12^th century European monasteries.

The monks found a lead stylus to be an ideal tool for their manuscripts, using it to outline illuminations and draw guiding lines for their handwritten texts.  Soon artists also adopted this soft lead stylus, but by the 13^th century, silver had been substituted as the artist’s preferred metal for drawings, both preparatory and finished.  Some of these works have survived, fresh and vibrant even today.  Silverpoint’s heyday came during the High Renaissance when Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Durer, Holbein and others produced extraordinary drawings in silver.  Then graphite mines were discovered.  By the 1550s, silverpoint, a difficult, exacting medium precluding erasure, fell largely into disuse as artists turned to the more versatile, forgiving drawing media of graphite and chalk. The medium was only “rediscovered” in the 19^th century when a copy of Cennino Cennini’s manuscript for “Il Libro dell’ Arte” was found in the Vatican Library.  Once published and translated, his “how-to” book revealed the technique of silverpoint and a few artists experimented in it.  The Pre-Raphaelites, then Thomas Dewing, Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley, Picasso and others worked in silverpoint.  Today, only a handful of artists devote full time energies to silverpoint drawing in the United States.

Stella once described it as an “unbending, inexorable” medium, for despite silver’s wonderfully sensuous feel as you draw, errors cannot be erased.  The traces left on the prepared paper surface are particles of metal and they are permanent.  However, the metal’s softness provides a delicacy and sensitivity, combined with immediacy, freshness and precision. Over time, the silver tarnishes and darkens to a soft, warm brown, lending additional depth to a drawing.  Copper, gold and platinum are also used for drawing, but silver is the metal most frequently used. Bruce Weber, Senior Curator, 19^th Century Art, at the National Academy Museum, once remarked, “Silverpoint allows artists to display their knowledge of form and mastery of hand.  It has the unique capacity to be both exacting and exceedingly delicate, subtle and sensual.”  Silverpoint allows me a shimmering dialogue with my surrounding world.

For more information on my silverpoint and graphite drawings, as well as my watercolour paintings, please go to my website at http://www.jeanninecook.com.