In the late spring of this year, May, my wife Anna and I left for Bulgaria, her home country and returned to our home in Indiana about three weeks later. While in Bulgaria, I challenged myself to fill three sketchbooks; a pocket sketchbook, a small sketchbook that fit into my drawing tool pouch and a 9×12 inch book. This was almost accomplished. Half of the large book was left unfilled. This post offers a selection of the results as well as thoughts about sketching in general.
I sketch because it allows me to better experience, see and be present with those few moments with the sketch. With the sketchbook I am allowed something of a meditation on place. In this sense sketching is the work of recreation. Sketching, as is the function of language, lends weight to relationships to a larger world. It also allows connections to appear, otherwise lost in a recycling world of everyday weeks and days. Having to focus on a perspective for maybe 5 minutes (my quickest sketches) to three hours I am, by default, in the position to seek out the chain of connection that makes a place worthy of attention and care.
En plein air sketches, in this same sense, are most interesting as a conversation between pencil line and the perspective before us. That conversation is revealed by the unraveling and sorting out of the edges observed as well as the unseen edges that mark the frontier of our language and world. Drawings emerge as they do, then, out of forces that have nothing to do with what is seen but, instead, with what is understood to have significance. As a sketch offers a presence and immanence of the moment it also offers a sense of significance satisfied by the dialog between the drawing itself, people around me, constructed histories, myths of many kinds and needling into relatively foreign worlds such as the world of pine trees and mountains.
My best sketches evidence an openness to the world amid the process of sketching. In such a sketch I’ve already seen what I am trying to sketch but there is something about the atmosphere of the sketch that brings me to see and draw what has always been there but bring into evidence what I have not seen before. In such a sketch I might find how a particular tree is related to its fellow tree, sky and perhaps house roof. There will be, most certainly, worlds that are foreign to me within the perspective that I am concerned with as well but they are likely entirely unseen and un-sketched.
I remember what it was like experiencing the world before and after I was educated to be an architect as well as before and after I learned something about the life of trees. An educated architect will, for example, look for reciprocal relationships: light – passage, story, ritual,, rain – slope of roof, garden, tree etc. Such understandings are likely to resolve in a more interesting and aware drawing. While we can observe the geometries in a perspective and we may be able to mimic it in the drawing we will not be able to care about a perspective, give it our due attention, unless we are better aware of the patterns and histories illuminating the place we are drawing. Drawing without caring, in other words, is likely to result in a ‘dumb’ drawing of even if the lines are nicely drawn and the shadows are deftly rendered.1
Unfamiliar places push us to be better open to the world and to seek out connections often lost but present in our mundane home environments. There is also something about the pleasure of novelty that gives us permission to sit on a bench or log for an hour or so to really see what is before us. The desire to untangle the “the lay of the land” seems to be a natural attitude in a foreign place. Most of us do indeed seek the novelty of the foreign and in such places we likewise seek to untangle its genus loci. Thus, the ancient traditions of the guided tour and souvenirs.
In Bulgaria were spare moments that allowed me to sketch and reacquaint myself with beloved landscapes and some time to get to know new places. Most of our time was spent in Anna’s hometown of Velingrad but we made it a point to visit some defining Bulgarian sites that have been neglected over my four previous visits. These places included two significant ancient Thracian sites; Perperikon and Tatul as well as the historically important Batak and Bansko, Bulgaria. Both Perperikon and Tatul are sacred architecture devoted to Dionysus and Orpheus. Orpheus is said to have been born in Thrace (the ancient name covered largely by modern Bulgaria). The birthplace of Dionysus and his cult is a little more ambiguous but still if we take the word of Herodotus seriously, Dionysus “danced from Thrace” to Greece. Still, given the attention given to Trifon Zarezan in Bulgaria, an Orthodox saint associated with grapes and wine making that in many respects recalls Dionysus; the ancient god still has a home in Bulgaria.
Most of the images sketched were of places in Velingrad’s mountain paths and townscapes because in Velingrad I had the time to draw. But, I did have a few moments to sketch during the relatively whirlwind visits to ancient ruins along the eastern Rhodope mountains of Perperikon. A few sketches also came out of our visits to Bansko, Batak and Sofia. Velingrad, a truly beautiful town, lies on the north side of the Rhodope mountains within the roughly north-south oriented Chapino valley. The present town is composed of three municipalities, Chepino (Чепино), Ladzene (Лъджене), and Kamenitsa (Каменица). All three merged into Velingrad in 1948. The name, Velingrad, commemorates a young partisan, Vella Peeva, who hid in the mountains, was found and “martyred” by police loyal to the then axis aligned government. Her portrait is sculpted in the heroic style of communist era. Her sculpted, bespectacled eyes look in the direction of a newly constructed 22 meter high ‘tinker-toy’ Christian cross with obvious concern.
When the Chepino Valley was part of the Ottoman Empire it was largely the home of Pomaks. Pomaks are Bulgarians, originally christians (both orthodox and an Armenian Christian sect (Paulicians) who converted to Islam as early as the 15th century.2
The region remained largely Muslim until the late 19th century when, at that time, there was significant displacement from southwest Bulgaria or Pirin Macedonia (at that time still under the Ottoman Empire until 1912). Much of Velingrad and Anna’s family comes from this area. In this region are the Pirin mountains and a town called Bansko. At present, Bansko is the home of a popular jazz festival and skiing resort town as well as being a destination for enthusiastic mountaineers and hunters. Bansko, however, has an important place in Bulgarian history as the birthplace of a principal founder of the Bulgarian Revival, the foundations of Bulgarian secular education and here an influential icon painting school was established. The revival of Bulgarian arts in this town were likely able to flourish because of its relative isolation. On the other hand, with a little effort, people living in Bansko could find well traveled roads to the great cities of the time. The Tsarigrad Road lying about 65 km to the northeast went between Serbia and Istanbul and followed the path of the Roman’s ancient Via Militaris. Other passages followed the parallel north-south Sturma and Mesta (Nestos, Greek) river valleys to Solun (Thessaloniki). Such a naturally fortified place would have offered some hesitation to tax collectors sent by the local Ottoman beylerbeys.
Paisius Hilendarski (1722-1773), sat to write the Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya, this key document establishing the Bulgarian Revival at Mount Athos’ Hilandar and Zograph monasteries. Toma Vishanov, the painter who establish Bansko’s icon school left to be educated in Vienna, became known a Moler, from the German word maler (painter) and apparently returned and stayed in Bansko. Neofit Rilski (1793-1881) the polymath who is created Bulgaria’s first secular school spent his carrier principally in the near-by Rila Monastery. In sum, Bansko was a focus for a Bulgarian enlightenment as well as a place that urged Bulgarian autonomy amid Ottoman suppression. The region around Bansko offered refuge and support to a number of uprisings that presaged the Balkan Wars and sought the unification of the orphaned region now called North Macedonia.3 Many families that now live in Velingrad fled east to the towns in Chepino Valley. This is how most of my wife’s family arrived in the region as well as a number of their friends. There are dramatic stories involving her family enduring and participating in the battles of the Balkan Wars and the WWI.
A note on drawing materials: About 25 years ago when I found the then called Negro Kon-I-Noor, I gave up using lead pencils to sketch with. Cretacolor Nero pencils replaced the Negro pencils but seem little different. According to a number of sources the Nero and Negro pencils are made with charcoal rather than graphite.The manufacturer uses wax and or an oil as a binder-medium, despite this the lines erase rather cleanly.
The pencil, in contrast to a traditional graphite and clay pencil, gives a very black non reflective line. I am using the Japanese brush pens more often as they replicate the process I use to decorate pottery with a brush. I have used the Mangak and Pigma brush pens both I’ve used Razor Point pens since my days as an architectural designer. They offer almost as much flexibility as a soft pencil in terms of line sensitivity and because they are water soluble allowing lines to be washed with a slight bit of water for a tone or to be nearly erased. I constantly carried the pocket sketchbook with a Razor Point pen and sketched whenever I had time waiting for one reason or another. The other sketch books, used at places where I intended to ‘see’ use of the other sketchbooks, were more intentional.
- Still, we need only to pick up our ‘smart phone’ look at the screen and type in anything and any place on earth and it will appear on the screen. Now, with ‘artificial intelligence’ enmeshed into the browser’s search engine we don’t even have to struggle with search terms and we can more easily race right to some patch of earth, with in the world wide stream of zeros and ones, that we are concerned with. Which can give us pause, do we really need to travel? Indeed, is our felt need to walk in a forest the ghost of an atavistic pastime that can just as well be covered by digital representation? We are ineluctably drawn and addicted to the soft peddling of our digital screens but we also are aware how they betray us. Having been thrown into AI without our vote we are disarmed we are delivered into a mirror-world fueled on commerce and pushed away from the possibilities of the serendipity of real things.
- Neither the origin of the term Pomak nor when when it was first used is agreed upon by scholars. The term is still routinely used today to indicate Christians that had converted to Islam, whether by coercion or through expediency, during Ottoman domination. Though conversion of Christians under the Ottoman Turks began as early as the 14th century in the Balkans the term, according to Aşkın Koyuncu (https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=928783) was not used until the early nineteenth century. Muslim communities survive in Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Macedonia and other regions once under Ottoman control. Most sources agree that the term Pomak is derogatory and that the this distinct community generally would prefer to be called, if Bulgarian, Bulgarian Muslims. There is no consensus regarding the root of the term Pomak some suggestions include: tortured or helpers. See also https://minorityrights.org/communities/bulgarian-speaking-muslims-pomaks/
- With the 1876 uprisings against their Ottoman rulers Bulgaria as well as neighboring countries began to loosen themselves from a deteriorating Ottoman Empire. Seeking an opportunity to profit from chaos in the area the Russians moved in through Romania and into Bulgaria as well as the eastern Caucasus to effectuate a sixth Russo-Ottoman war.While Russian intervention granted increased power and some land for the Russians, as well as greater autonomy to Bulgarian, Serbian and Romanian peoples, this region had disturbingly fluctuating boarders. It was not until the end of world war II that official boarders were recognized. Still into the 21st century boarders are debated by Bulgarians and their neighbors.