“You See More
As You Look At It”

In any miscellany like the one gathered in the exhibition ​“Making History: Antiquaries in Great Britain” currently at the Yale Center for British Art through May 27, there are always unexpected small glories. One of them is this drawing of Wells Cathedral by a 19th Century artist named John Carter (not, I think, to be confused with the muscular hero of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, or the disastrous recent film adaptation). Its precision and imagination reminded me immediately of work by New Haven artist Joseph Smolinski, whom I invited to the gallery for a conversation.

Joseph Smolinski: It’s incredible to me what happens on this miniaturized scale…it’s like meditation, where the goal is the thinness of the line and you learn how to just hover gently above the paper.

Stephen Kobasa: It’s not perfect, though it gives the illusion of being that … there’s still a human hand at work here.

JS: Absolutely. There are some inconsistencies — but we believe in it, our eye fills in the gaps. I think we are used to seeing images like this that are not done by hand.

SK: We assume some machine-made precision … I like what you say about this being a meditation … the discipline of drawing a line.

JS: There is a sense, too, of making a mark in that pause between inhaling and exhaling when your body is still [and] you can concentrate on just the thinness of the line, that single touch. This isn’t a beginner’s drawing — this person has made lots of drawings that have this sort of delicacy to them. There is a sophistication of layering — which lines need to be darker, which lines need to be lighter.

SK: We can see the lines, even through the shadows.

JS: The other thing, too, is that artists are really used to working from photography now. Working from observation is something that can really change the perception of an image…being able to be there.

SK: It’s obviously a view that you can’t have as such, and yet you assume that it is the product of direct experience. It’s not a preparatory architectural drawing; the building is finished. You have to go in and register it and then reduce it and then conceive it as if the cutaway could actually be visible.

JS: The structure is the most important part about it, but he’s definitely gone in and revealed some of the details … you believe the artist was definitely in the space. It is a lost art in a way … drawing from observation … looking really closely. It’s tedious. It’s time consuming.

SK: The splendor of the tracery and the sheer functionality of the roof beams are treated with the same kind of precision…

JS: I like these voids that let us know that this is a part of the building cut in half. It’s a cue how to read it, but it’s also a nice design element.

SK: You see more and more in this as you look at it … a door here, just cracked open … and there are these hints of color as if the stained glass could be just barely registered.

JS: These cathedrals are impossible to take in all at one glance.

SK: Making them miniature doesn’t make them any easier to fathom … you reduce the scale but you don’t reduce the complexity, the grandeur, of it.

JS: I have a hard time understanding some of these tiniest little lines. A quill pen can be fairly fine, but I wonder if even something like an etching stylus was used…a very, very thin point and just the residue of the ink after you’ve drawn a few times on the page and let the line sort of run out. But I also imagine that there were some tools used as well. You could possibly cut out a little shape — a template — and scribe over and over and over again … that’s what I would do.

SK: It does not seem as regular as it would be using a cut pattern … although the variations are small, they’re still apparent.

JS: In the decorative elements, some of the filigree, you can tells there’s a quality of the hand … the lines begin thick but end thin. There’s a sense of the applied mark — an irregularity to it — that makes it seem as if it was all by hand. The thing of it, too, is that you can’t erase ink. Once it’s on the page, it’s on the page.

SK: Unforgiving … it’s certainly a work of singular confidence. You have to be convinced.

JS: I like that the drawing is set in all this empty space … using the white on the paper is always important to me in my work.

SK: It’s not really empty.

JS: No, not by any means.

SK: Whatever is around it vanishes by comparison … the natural world goes on mutating around it, but this is the fixed order … nothing changes here.