Drawing Mindfulness
By Stephanie Buer
BFA The College for Creative Studies 2006

A Thesis Support Paper Submitted In Partial Fulfillment Of The
Requirements For The Degree Of
Master Of Fine Arts

Emily Carr University of Art + Design 2022

1

Table of Contents

Territorial Acknowledgement

3

Introduction

3

Method

5

Positionality

15

Research Methodology

18

Walking // Noticing
Silence // Emptiness
Resistance

Artistic Influence

31

Andrew Wyeth
Vija Celmins
Etel Adnan
Conclusion

42

Images

43

Works Cited

44

Bibliography

46

2

Territorial Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge that for the past two years I have been studying, creating,
writing, and residing on the unceded, ancestral lands of the sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish),
xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. The works that I have
created during my time here have been directly inspired by the landscapes that these peoples
have cared for and called home since time immemorial. These works were made from a place
of wonder, humility and love for this beautiful place and it is not enough for me to simply
acknowledge the land and those who once lived freely here but it is my hope that the care and
stewardship of this place and all the lands of North America will soon be given back to its
rightful owners.

Introduction

I made the decision to pursue my Masters of Fine Arts Degree at Emily Carr in February
of 2020. What a strange moment to look back on in light of the global pandemic and the
myriad of ways it has upended lives. Getting an MFA has been something I have wanted to do
for so long and the anticipation and excitement I was feeling at that moment, coupled with the
thrill of getting to move to a new country were incredible. What a rough two years it ended up
being though. It took me a while to get up to Vancouver, due to Visa application delays
because of Covid but once I was here, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for the
amount of alone time I was about to spend with myself. I had to cross the border alone; no
one could come with me or visit me, and I couldn’t go home because of the fourteen-day

3

quarantine. My cohort has been absolutely amazing but socializing and physically being
together, especially that first year, was difficult because of restrictions.

I have never in my life spent so much time alone nor felt so utterly alone. It sounds
depressing and although yes, it was very difficult at times, it turned out to be a strangely
generative experience for me. The place that I ended up moving to was two blocks up the
street from Locarno and Jericho Beaches. I knew nothing of them when I made the decision to
live there but I have become so attached to this place and it has brought me so much solace.
My cell phone rarely works here in Vancouver, a complication from moving to a new country,
and I never ended up fixing it even though it often causes frustration because I secretly love
that it does not work. It adds to the sense of loneliness and further enhances this relationship
I’ve formed with my new home. The minute I leave the Wi-fi bubble I am completely alone and
undistracted. These moments, during my walks on the beach, have given me so much time to
really think about my relationship to myself, to the world around me, to my art, and what I want
to share through it. It sounds cliché but when life throws us into unexpected, strange and
difficult situations, we grow so much and that has been an unexpected outcome of this MFA
experience. I’ve begun to see my practice and this solitary meditative state of walking and
connecting to place, as integral to my art making, an intentional mindset that is reflected in my
studio practice. The loneliness has brought a clarity of contemplation.
I consider myself to be a representational landscape artist, working in both oil and
charcoal. It is very easy for others to initially see my practice as simply these beautiful finished
pieces. However, there is so much more to it that I am seeking to discover and learn about in
the works I create. I have questions that I am intrigued by and hopeful that in an intentional art
practice like drawing, I will be able to find answers to them. They are questions about what it

4

means to be a thoughtful, present person, how to care for myself and others through
intentional living and mindfulness. How to slow down in order to fall in love with my physical
surroundings and the natural beauty, how to exist in a state of wonder and magic with
everything around me, spending time in the landscape, cultivating a deep, rich relationship.
Intentionality thinking of these works I am creating, from their very early stages, through their
meticulous creation in the studio and the final realized image, as a form of mindful meditation.
Searching for a state of being which allows me to step out of and resist the daily busy-ness, of
life, of being constantly distracted in an attempt to keep up with the fast-paced world, of being
overworked and entangled in the never-ending urge to be available through technology.

It is my hope that I could create a practice that in every step of the process, will offer
resistance, a respite, a chance for the antithesis of hurried modern life. The research questions
I am hoping to explore through my thesis engage with these thoughts. What does it look like
to make time to just stare at the physical world around me and allow myself to exist in wonder,
to prioritize a lifestyle of slow, deliberate observation, a gesture in opposition to the attention
economy of modern Western society? To then take this slowness into my studio and spend
hundreds of hours in thoughtful art making to recreate these moments of quiet solitude and
considered gentleness? What does it mean for a meditative drawing practice to be a form of
resistance?

Method

Jericho Beach I is a charcoal drawing of the pier at Jericho Beach originally known in
Squamish as iy’a’l’mexw, located West of downtown Vancouver, on the South shore of the

5

Burrard inlet. It was February on a foggy, snowy day. This piece began with a walk in the snow.
I had just moved to Canada, and it was my first day out of my fourteen-day quarantine. The
landscape was totally new to me and I was excited to take advantage of the amazing weather
to get acquainted. My works are always about places and the relationships I form with them
and the work always begins with taking photographs. Sometimes they are quick first
impressions, moments I find visually interesting. Other times images are gathered slowly over
time, as a connection grows and a place begins to have more meaning to me.

Fig. 1 Stephanie Buer, Jericho Beach I, 2021

I find it very difficult to put into words exactly what it is about certain places and
moments that stop me in my tracks and overwhelm me with this urge to recreate them through
drawing. I have witnessed breathtaking sunsets and awe-inspiring mountain vistas but they

6

never place this fire in me to rush back to the studio to draw or paint them. I’m not certain why
this is. Yi-Fu Tuan is an author and landscape theorist whom I look to in expanding the ways in
which I relate to landscapes and in his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience,
he describes this exact same feeling I’m referring to in the chapter on “Intimate Experiences of
Place.” He is writing about how we often find beauty in the most unexpected places,
particularly the cities in which we live and spend the majority of our time, for example the glow
of a highway lamp or the trodden earth of an oft used path through an abandoned lot.

At the time we do not say, “this is it,” as we do when we admire objects of conspicuous
or certified beauty. It is only in reflection that we recognize their worth. At the time we
are not aware of the drama; we do not know that the seeds of lasting sentiment are
being planted. (Tuan 143)

In conjunction with those sentiments, I think that, for myself, it also has to do with a
feeling of solitude, quiet, maybe loneliness, or melancholy, as well as the way that certain
textures and shapes, weather and light speak to these emotions in a particular moment. It is
the juxtaposition of human-made and natural objects, an unusual conversation taking place
that speaks to my soul of uncommon and unnatural beauty, a place that doesn’t quite fit in.

When I find a moment and a landscape I am struck by, I stop and take photos and
sometimes make sketches on site. I go back to the studio with these images and will print
them out and mull them over. I know that the use of photography in representational
artmaking has been a point of contention ever since it became widely available and I would like
to take a moment out of my method description to address my feelings toward the use of
photography within representational drawing and painting. I use photography in the way that

7

almost every representational artist uses it nowadays, as a tool, along with any other tool or
piece of technology I use. In order to feel comfortable using photography to inform my work it
is important for me to be aware of where it falls short and a very obvious shortcoming is the
ways in which it affects my connection to the landscape, and how it can make connections
brief. Susan Sontag, an American writer, and theorist writing in the latter half of the 20th
century writes on this in her book On Photography when discussing the ways in which tourists
take pictures while on vacation, using it as: “A way of certifying experience, taking
photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic,
by converting experience into an image, a souvenir . . . This gives shape to experience: stop,
take a photograph, and move on.” (Sontag 9) Photographing landscapes is quick but my time
out in the landscape is not defined by the amount of time required to take a photograph, a
deep relationship with place cannot be built in that time frame. Photography also only
captures very specific moments and my drawings are often built of many photographs or
moments of certain locations compiled over days, weeks, months, even years observing in real
life and in captured images how the shape of clouds change within the fog, how the horizon
line comes forward and recedes in different types of weather. A finished drawing in my studio
is very rarely made from one single image. Even when using a single image, I heavily edit what
I feel should be included or excluded from a finished drawing based on creating the
atmosphere or memory of a place, how I remember it, or how it made me feel, more so than
how it “actually” looked.

8

Fig. 2. A photo reference of fog, 2022

It is a piece of technology that I use in my art making process, to create my charcoal
drawings. A convenience that allows me to collect images of places I love as I collect
memories of places I inhabit, and to use them to inspire my works. My charcoal drawings are
not the beach, and they’re not the photo; they exist on their own, in an entirely independent
and meaningful way.

Once I gather these photos and sketches together, mixed with my memories and
mental impressions of place, I begin looking for interesting contrasts, textures and
composition, something that keeps that initial spark of attraction burning. I often know right

9

away, at first glance which images carry that original attraction. I am overcome and cannot get
it out of my head. It is again, an intuition that is so hard to put into words. This moment, when
I fall in love with a landscape while out wandering and then again with the photograph in the
studio, is what fuels my practice. There is so much self-motivation needed in the studio, to
make work happen and especially within a process as tedious and time consuming as
representation drawing, it would not be sustainable without this fascination.

I was attracted to this particular image, which I gathered on that day as the fog, the
ocean and the snow blurred the horizon lines and the shadows. It was very atmospheric and
monochromatic and I found it to be calming and lonely. There was so much negative space
and emptiness for me to play with in order to further explore the subtleties of mark making. It
was also the way that the subtle footprints in the freshly fallen snow, hinted at the presence of
someone, a stillness, a contemplation that resembled my own interactions with that place. The
dark shapes of the empty pier and how it speaks to the human-made in landscape but also
adds direction, a line for the eye to travel from foot prints to horizon line. Though my work is
representational, I draw inspiration from abstract painters as they are so skilled at creating
movement in composition. This tool takes on greater importance when the relatable imagery is
taken away and is why I believe, abstract painters are so masterful at this skill. If I stand back,
look at my work and squint my eyes to blur the photo references or finished drawings, and I
see an interesting abstract composition, I get excited. It has to be visually interesting as a
representation landscape but also as an abstract work of art.
I then take that time spent in mindful solitude out of doors and bring it into my studio.
The presence of mind I experience while I am out gathering images, and connecting to place is
mimicked through my drawing process, it is personal, deliberate and intimate, built around

10

mindfulness and a carefully considered use of time and labor. I will elaborate in detail here; I
begin with a piece of Rives BFK printmaking paper. It is an unusual choice for representational
drawing but I find that the rougher texture accentuates the abstract quality of the marks. When
viewed up close the paper helps the recognizable image to melt away and the small marks
become more visible and intimate. I then lay in the image, by hand with a graphite pencil.
Once that is finished, I begin building up layers with charcoal and cross hatching until the
image is complete. The rendering always happens from the upper left corner across to lower
right, the reason being that I am right-handed, and that it is so essential in the finished piece
for there to be absolute perfection and tidiness. I cannot have any smudging, especially if I am
leaving large areas of paper blank as negative space. This habit also mimics the action of
reading, and although it is not a reflection of actual reading, as in a book, it is similar to the way
I “read” a scene, my eyes travel carefully over each object moving left to right, across my view.
This slow, intentional way of moving across the landscape with my pencil brings me into a
deeper understanding and curiosity with all the objects within my view and picture plane,
meditating for long periods of time on each element.

Fig 3. Drawing in Progress, 2021

11

I prefer to use a certain type of charcoal called carbon. There is a greater ratio of wax to
charcoal than in a standard charcoal pencil. As a result of the increase in wax, and combined
with the toothier texture of the paper, the blacks become much richer and darker. The blacks
don’t have the sheen of a graphite, or the chalky quality of a standard charcoal; carbon is a
matte black, that is so consuming in its rich darkness. It adds great depth to the work. The
depth in the blacks is also built up very slowly, starting with the lighter shades and up through
the pencil hardness to the softest, darkest carbon pencil. It is a long and tedious process but it
is the duration of time spent in thoughtful, working meditation that makes the pieces more
meaningful to me.

The duration in and of itself is a powerful component of the work, on many levels. Each
piece is painstakingly made over anywhere from eighty to two hundred hours, depending on
the size. Hours which are spent alone, with just a piece of paper and a charcoal pencil. It is
painfully minimal in materials, and tremendously time consuming. What does this time
requirement signify in modern, western society? Do we have that much time to sit, to be still
and to create in such a minimally focused manner? Still being productive in a sense but in a
slightly ridiculous, counterproductive sense. So many things are begging for my attention:
work, expectations, social media, emails, texts. Our world is an intensely busy, overstimulating
place, and attention spans are both short and worn thin. The stress of surviving, keeping up
and staying connected is crushing. What does it mean to stop and stare, to wonder at a
beautiful, simple landscape? On top of that, what does it mean to take it further and spend
hundreds of hours quietly alone, with a simple paper and pencil and bring that landscape to
life, with one tiny scratch at a time? I am sitting, staring, being with these spaces for a
completely unreasonable amount of time and I am in love with this gesture and how in a way, it

12

resists our fast-paced society. Just to be still and wonder, endlessly about the world, this is the
embodiment of my practice.

This working meditation that I experience when I am drawing is difficult for me to
experience in other media. The simplicity of those materials and the slow build-up of marks
remind me of the quiet moments I have while sitting in the landscape, without the distraction
of all the things that disrupt my mind in the day to day. These moments bring me much calm,
peace and clarity, they are essential to my mental health and happiness and I love how being
out of doors and in the flow state of drawing are so connected in this way. I am a creature of
solitude, of silence, and stillness and this practice is my home. My hope is that this gentleness
will translate to the viewer as they experience the drawings. When first seeing the drawings
from a distance, viewers are impressed by the representational quality of the beautiful scene
but up close, viewers are often struck by the transition, the rough texture of the paper and the
distinctive and deliberate marks change the image and the experience. In choosing not to
blend the charcoal but showing each mark, the viewer transitions from the illusion of the
scenery to being struck by the obviously time consuming and meditated marks, that stand
alone but harmoniously join to build the whole. The viewer in a sense is living both vicariously
through the imagery as well as through each discrete mark made on the paper. Giving them
the opportunity through this honest and meditative process, to step out of their hectic, fast
paced, and noisy world, to slow down, and appreciate the landscape, labor, intimacy, and
solitude.

13

Fig 4. Drawing detail, 2021

Fig 5. Stephanie Buer, Burrard Inlet, 2021

14

Having described in detail the inner workings of my method, as an artist, and how these
processes are interrelated in regards to my seeking of a state of mind and a state of existing in
the world, I would now like to talk about how I was originally attracted to this type of working
as well as this way of connecting to the landscapes and the places with which I draw inspiration.
I could be painting and drawing literally anything, but I choose landscapes and why do I
choose landscapes? What is in me that feels such a strong pull and connection to the land?
Also, how does who I am and where I came from influence my thoughts toward the land?
There is also this predilection in my character to seek out balance and calm. It is in my
personality to be a more relaxed person. I often wonder if it is a characteristic I have
intentionally cultivated or is it something I am born with? Whichever it is, I seem to always be
seeking the slow, the silent, the peaceful and continually looking for it in the landscape.

Positionality

The land has always played an important role in my life and in my upbringing. Growing
up in rural Michigan, we were very poor. For many folks it may have seemed like a neglected
childhood, defined by all the things that were not there. There were no trips to Disneyland, no
vacations at all actually. No fancy house, a run-down trailer in fact, that was in constant need of
repair. However, when I look back on those early years that shaped me, I don’t see the
deficiencies; I see a golden childhood, lived almost entirely out of doors. The type of childhood
where shoes came off on the last day of school as you ran outside and rarely went back on until
the classes started up in the fall. Summers filled with fishing, swimming, building forts,
climbing trees, and riding bikes. Though I had few material possessions, what my father had

15

that he shared with me was a love and respect for land and nature. In hindsight, that to me, is
a greater gift than any other I could have received. I’ve carried this attachment into my
adulthood as well. Wherever I go, wherever I have lived I have been outdoors, whether it was
wandering the streets of Detroit, rock climbing in the deserts of Oregon, or mountaineering in
the alpine in Washington, it’s a love and attachment I will never outgrow. It forms the base and
the passion that drives my life and my art practice. It is through drawing that I come to better
know a place physically and how I inhabit it.

I’ve always admired my father and looked up to him. I wanted to do everything he did,
as a kid, go everywhere he went. I spent countless weekends up north at our family cabin on
hunting and fishing trips with him and my siblings. There were no rules up north; you could
wander and do whatever you liked. As children that forest was where we became comfortable
with being in nature, and it nurtured our imaginations. You could wander for hours and never
get lost. My father used to say, “just walk till you hit a fence, follow it to a gate and then follow
the road home.” I spent a great amount of time alone, in the woods up there, I had favorite
trees, swamps, and fields, places I would sit for hours on end, alone, just listening. This is how
my father was in nature as well, and I inherited this demeanor from him. We would walk for
hours and he would always tell me he enjoyed my company because he never felt the need to
speak. We just existed so amicably and peacefully together. He admired things about me that
others thought were so odd; they would tell me I was shy and I was so slow but my father
would tell me that I wasn’t slow, that I was deliberate and he liked that about me.

Also, what an unexpected joy to be a child of the generation before computer and
internet technology existed! Those days, weekends, weeks, spent in the woods with my dad

16

were entirely phone-less, social media-less. I would love to go back in time just to experience
that clear and un-distracted mind, my child self that ran to the woods at every opportunity to
just sit and be alone in nature. I am constantly chasing those moments nowadays. Those
moments where you step out of time, step out of the demands of the day-to-day and just exist
for the sake of existing, enjoying the world around you with no objective and no distractions.

My art practice today is a continuous conversation with those early moments in life. I
am still that child, so happy in solitude, in nature; I really haven’t changed much at all.
Sometimes it is harder to slow down and tap into that magic, and my art is a way to keep that
connection alive. Always looking for ways in which to recreate the simple moments in place
through mark making. Seeking to connect with the land, to be at peace in solitude, I yearn to
share it with others, through the work, and to give them an opportunity to experience that
childlike wonder of just existing and enjoying nature.

However, there is conflict in this relationship, especially as it pertains to my love of
re-creating and connecting to landscape through my art, that I feel I must address. I am
descended from European immigrants and settlers. No matter where I live and work in North
America, I am always living and working on land that was stolen from Indigenous peoples.
Also, as a European descendant making artwork about land, I acknowledge that the history of
landscape painting in North America, is fraught with difficulties, with a dishonest, entitled and
selfish past. So, although I feel a deep connection to and love of place, these places I have
loved and called home have a very dark, conflicted past. They have been stolen from their
original inhabitants through greed, genocide, coercion and dishonesty.

17

If I am to continue to make work about land, it must be with the utmost gentleness,
gratitude, humility and openness to listen, to be very mindful of what my work conveys and
adds to the conversation, and not to perpetuate past wrongs. These thoughts will be touched
on again later in this writing and further, this work is ongoing and most likely unending, being
mindful in this way has already taught me so much in my short time here in British Columbia on
unceded territory and at Emily Carr University where there is a strong emphasis on reading and
learning Indigenous history and ways of knowing.

Research Methodology

Walking // Noticing

It is so important within my practice to always be looking intently at the world around
me, noticing objects, their relationships with each other, their relationship with myself, the
weather, the light, the way that I am feeling. Over the years of learning to be more aware of
my surroundings, I have cultivated a habit of making time for wonder. Since a young age I have
made time to cultivate a deliberate rhythm of moving through the world that allows me the
time to stop at any moment, to be present to converse with the landscape and notice, it is what
my dad always referred to as my “being deliberate.” This is where the research methodology
begins. If I want to make works that embody a sense of calm in order to counteract the
disconnected-ness of our society, cultivating a practice that prioritizes “seeing” is an important
first step. Cultural Theorist, Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Burnout Society addresses ways
in which technology and modern life are causing mental degradation in our society and ways in

18

which we can work towards more aware, mental states and one of those methods is through a
“Pedagogy of Seeing” he elaborates:

Learning to see means “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things
come to you”- that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention,
casting a long and slow gaze. Such learning-to-see represents the “first preliminary
school for spirituality [Geistigkeir].” (Han 21)

My image gathering is a form of seeing, and it takes place while walking or biking.
Walking is an effective way to slow down, to organize my thoughts and also to turn my
attention towards the tangible world around me. The moment I stop using my truck to
navigate the world and use my own two feet or even my bicycle, I’m moving at a pace that is
more human, it allows for a freedom of thought and observation that is more appropriate.
Driving is fast and stressful; my mind is not at ease; I’m not noticing and connecting. In my
place here in Vancouver, I bike and/or walk every day and I’ve begun to build a relationship
with this place I now inhabit. Jenny Odell, is an American artist, writer and educator and in her
book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, talks at great length about how
we can and should reshape our lives to reflect this philosophy of slowing down, to exist in the
physical realm, to become more aware of ourselves, and to notice the world around us and
how others and ourselves live in that world: “I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s
participation in history and in a more-than-human community, from either a social or ecological
perspective, the ultimate goal of ‘doing nothing’ is to wrest our focus from the attention
economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.” (Odell xii)

19

What an important practice “noticing” is, and walking really strengthens this practice.
An absolutely imperative skill, taking time to notice forces a situatedness in the real, and it
cultivates curiosity. This semester I was given the opportunity to teach a foundation drawing
class at Emily Carr. Learning to teach drawing has had this strange way of clarifying what it is I
do, and how I do it, highlighting things that are important to the process. While developing a
curriculum I realized early on that just as important as teaching my students to draw, I needed
to cultivate in them a practice of noticing. Working on being fully present to notice is a difficult
skill but it is essential to my practice and to knowing the landscape. Odell writes on noticing,
and wonderfully sums up my very thoughts on what it means to move intentionally throughout
the places that we live and to allow ourselves to be surprised by them: “Snaking through the
midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and
seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting
and things being eaten away – all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.” (Odell 126)

Fig. 6. Stephanie Buer, Smoke I, 2020

Almost every day, on my bike ride home from the studio, when it is dark, I stop by this
same log at Jericho Beach and see the same Great Blue Heron. She’s always in the same spot,

20

just near the shore, hunting. It has become a daily ritual for me, to sit in those peaceful
moments and acknowledge this beautiful being. My nightly visits with the heron are a daily
reminder that I am just a small part of a larger, more complex and amazing world, a non
“human” centered world. Taking time out to connect and notice the ways that life moves
through this spot at the end of the street I live on, and has moved through it for thousands of
years, has been a deeply moving experience and I hope that love and respect for place will
seep into the drawings I create.

Fig. 7. The Great Blue Heron at Jericho Beach, 2022

Another way to interpret this important concept of noticing is through the physical
artworks themselves. I need this noticing and connecting to be represented in the pieces. I
choose drawing as a method to recreate these mindful moments, and I use drawing in a
representational style as I feel the wonder and magic of the illusion mimics the wonder and
magic I experience in real life. Also, my meticulous nature of working allows time to meditate

21

on the mark making and the spaces which I am spending time with. The method is very slow,
solitary and thoughtful, mirroring the mind set I have while out of doors immersed in nature.

The final product can often be dismissed as just being beautiful or exceptional in its
detail but just as I am working to cultivate a way of seeing on my walks, I believe this practice
should be mirrored in how we look at the finished pieces. In Susan Sontag’s writings about art
theory, she often advocates for the aesthetic, for the less “complicated” in art. In Sontag’s
text, “Against Interpretation” she discusses the main difference in viewing and critiquing work
that is more formal and aesthetic in nature versus those that lean more heavily on theory. She
begins with a short history lesson on where she sees the shift happen from when work was
allowed to exist purely for its pleasure and aesthetics, to when art needed to justify itself
through a concrete, conceptual interpretation in order to be taken seriously. I enjoy how she
argues to return art to its pre-conceptual based existence, referring to its magical properties, its
powers to transcend knowing and explanation. In the essay she writes; “In most modern
instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real
art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then
interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable,
conformable.”(Sontag 8). This argument really resonates with me and my practice. I believe
that the work should be allowed to simply exist and be enjoyed for the images that are present,
without the need for over explanation. Sometimes images are simply full of wonder, and
beauty and in my opinion these things should be able to stand on their own. They often stem
from a fascination with trees, or water or fog, just a general obsession with nature and its
inherent beauty. When I am out of doors, standing in awe of the snow for example, I don’t feel
the need to discover the concept behind this moment, I am just struck with it, simply as it is.
My hesitation with focusing too much on the theory, is that content often has a way of taking

22

the viewer outside of the physical work, asking them to go somewhere else, where the specific
content’s definition and substance lies more clearly. The beauty I am striving for in my work is
in being present, and it is difficult to ask the viewer simply to be present when the theory or
content is begging for them to go elsewhere in order to be fully understood. Sontag argues
further: “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear
more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art,
much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut
back content so that we can see the thing at all.” (Sontag )

Fig. 8. Stephanie Buer, Jericho Beach II, 2021

23

Silence // Emptiness

I also think that an intentional use of silence and emptiness in my work is a form of
research and resistance. I think that both silence and emptiness work in parallel in my
drawings. The empty space which I intentionally leave creates an atmosphere of silence and
both are very important forms of research in my drawing practice. In studying the importance
of empty space, or negative space in my work it is apparent and thus in need of address, the
lines that are easily drawn between my work and the work of earlier European, Romantic
landscape painters, a Western art movement taking placing around the mid 18th to mid 19th
century, and as its name suggests, it was moving away from the ideas and rationale coming out
of the Enlightenment and leaning into the more “Romantic”. Lines that are made even more
apparent in that I am a descendant of European settlers. I will start with acknowledging this tie
and move forward with a desire to distance myself from this movement. In my research I have
found the movement to be wholly masculine and imperialist in nature, it separates the human
from nature, taking the stance of “Man” viewing or being confronted with nature and it sees
the natural world as being filled with horror, terror and confrontation. While also seeing the
world as a place to make money, made up of natural resources to extract at any and all costs,
and artists of this era would often make works that glorified this. These are a few of the
troublesome lineages from which landscape art is often tied to. I would like to step into a
different way of conversing about art making within the landscape, a place where we view and
interact with the natural world more gently and respectfully. Art critic Jerry Saltz recently
shared a quote by American abstract painter Elizabeth Murray in which she is responding to a
question about how she fits into art history; “That way of seeing historically, belongs to the
guys. The greatest part about being a woman in the world of painting is that I’m not really part

24

of it. I can do whatever I want.” (Saltz) I would like to transition into a conversation with a
more feminine viewpoint, one that listens and learns about how we as humans should
respectfully exist within the natural world, especially learning from Indigenous ways of knowing,
working towards respect, reconciliation, and reciprocity. How can I make artworks about the
landscape that are different from the Romantics, not just different but subversive?

One of the ways in which I see my drawings working differently as landscapes is in the
way that they are presented and viewed. There is of course the obvious, representational
reading of the landscape, the easily consumed imagery. However, I like the reading to go a bit
deeper, to go beyond the easily consumed, to make the drawing vague and unsettling. This
happens in the double viewing of the work which I have mentioned earlier. From a distance it
is a landscape but move closer, move in very close to the drawing and the recognizable image
melts away, it becomes visible only as a fuzzy, somewhat messy collection of marks on a piece
of paper, undecipherable. The illusion is broken and the viewer is confronted with my own
personal relationship to the drawing, to the marks made by my hand, to my inner conversations
over long periods of time embedded in every tiny little mark. It is these tiny hatching lines,
made tediously and meditatively over long periods of time, time spent contemplating my place
in the world, the particular places I am connecting to, my labor and my commitment, that make
up these drawings. Not only do the marks become more visible but, in the melting away of the
imagery, the emptiness opens up on another level, a negative space of ambiguity and
ungrounded emptiness. It is as if my inherited relationship to the land is being untethered, and
undone, this disconnected seemingly empty space is a space of questioning. As the viewer
stands back the recognizable, consumable image returns but it is buzzing now, buzzing with a
double read that the viewer is now aware of, this ungrounded space as well as this gentle,

25

feminine way of seeing and creating, they are my attempts to interpret and better understand
the world around me, though meticulous care and attention.

Henry F. Skerrit in “Marking the Infinite”, his catalogue essay from the exhibition
entitled, Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia at
University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology; writes about the ways in which a
group of women Aboriginal artists from Australia have been expanding and changing this
conversation around landscape art and it really resonates with how I feel about this need to
shift from movements born of Western-centric absolutes that emerged from Romanticism and
high Modernism:

Coupled with the question mark that global warming places over the sustainability of
human life, there has never been a more urgent need for artists to develop new
world-pictures, ones that imagine our shared predicament as the diverse occupants of
the same planet. To meet the needs of our present, such world-pictures must
necessarily be both local and global; they must be planetary in scope but human in
scale; they must balance the big with the small. (Skerrit 9)

26

Fig. 9. Stephanie Buer, Untitled (fog), 2022.

27

Resistance

I also would like my practice to exist in a space that resists this mindset which is held so
staunchly in western society of always being busy, that a person’s worth is based on their labor,
on how well they do in their jobs, on how available and connected they are. This lifestyle of
overstimulation and hyper connectedness, that at every moment of the day I am available to
others; I want to be able to turn away from this lifestyle from time to time, to create space that
brings a counter-existence, one of waiting, of stillness, of wonder, moving slowly with intent,
allowing for moments in a day which go entirely against the status of what it means to be a
contributing member in a consumer-based capitalist society.

Rebecca Solnit is a contemporary American author who writes often about many of the
themes which inspire my work. We share a passion for this idea of connection to place, the
importance of walking in knowing and meditating and also this resistance to these time saving
technologies, and the ways in which they often rob us of our time and our attention, even
though they are billed as objects which should be time savers. It is such an odd dichotomy that
these things are invented and put into the world to build in more free time but in reality, do the
opposite. She addresses these ideas in her book on walking, Wanderlust:

The Multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free
time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize
the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most
workers more productive, not freer, in a world that seems to be accelerating around
them. Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what

28

cannot be quantified cannot be valued – that that vast array of pleasures which fall into
the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering,
window-shopping are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definitive, more
productive, or faster paced. (Solnit 10)

These “voids” are exactly the spaces I am interested in leaving unfilled; they are the spaces I
am seeking to elevate and maintain. Odell echoes Solnit when she writes about her
relationship to technology: “I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of
sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one,
which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail
of the real.” (Odell 29)

I am noticing a common theme among a lot of writers nowadays, for example, many of
those who I am reading and referencing in this text, who speak on these ideas of what it means
to be alive in the world today. Whether speaking on ecology, feminism, indigenous ways of
knowing, science, art theory, they all seem to be calling for an urgent need to turn away from
our phones, our computers, our workaholic tendencies and notice the world around us. This
noticing is crucial. This slowing down and connecting to the world could cultivate better
mental health, a better understanding of our fragile place in the world, and help us to become
better stewards and members of this planet. My nightly visits with the Great Blue Heron would
lead me to believe that this is true. These visits have changed me. I hope that my work and the
way that I live can contribute to this urgency through a kind of resistance. By “resistance” I am
referring to how I spend my time, putting away my phone for a while to fully enjoy those slow
meandering walks, noticing all the beautiful life around me, listening to the birds. Resistance
through silence, making space in my works for thoughtful reflection, an embrace of the

29

emptiness. Resistance through how I spend my work hours, sitting for an absolutely absurd
amount of time, lovingly crafting these natural landscapes one tiny mark at a time.

I find negative space to be an effective visual tool which I can use in my drawings to
speak to the importance of slowing down and making space for what Solnit refers to as
“woolgathering, cloud-gazing, and wandering”. Erling Kagge, Norwegian arctic explorer and
author, in his book, Silence in the Age of Noise writes, in regards to the music of Beethoven,
that it is in the pauses, in the silence that his work becomes so poignant, “He understood that
when we are exposed to silence, our minds and thoughts expand outward.” (Kagge 3)
Through the use of simple compositions, negative space, fine attention to detail and mark
making, I am trying to incorporate these mindful ways of moving through the world, allowing
for empty space and thoughtfulness. The depiction of a snowy evening or a foggy morning,
embodies this idea. Calm, meditative silence can be conveyed through the use of empty
space, allowing others to share in this presence, to suspend time and just exist in thoughtful
reflection and silence. This space can convey a cold breeze, the crunch of the snow underfoot
or the damp mist of the fog on one’s cheek: a universally shared language of being in the
elements and a part of the world. In my drawing Untitled (snow) I wanted to create space for
pause by leaving the majority of the picture as blank white paper, untouched by the pencil. By
expanding the negative space, it forces a greater emphasis on the elements that are highly
detailed and fully rendered, the logs, the power lines, and trees, but it does not overstimulate
the viewer as they can let their eyes move back into the emptiness and rest. I feel it embodies
silence and empty space.

30

Fig 10. Stephanie Buer Untitled, 2021.

Artistic Influences

Alongside my reading and research, it is also important for me to delve into my art
ancestry, and to be in dialogue with those artists that came before me, who learned and spoke
in a material language which I would like to learn from and align my own material language
with, those artists whose shoulders I stand upon. Nothing that I myself do in my studio would
be possible without the works of those that came before me both in regards to making the
material process possible, but also in the inspiration and formal aspects that I build upon.
Recognizing and valuing my artistic influences provides me with the opportunity to see the

31

world as artists from past generations saw it and how they chose to interpret it through their
material practice. Who am I studying and pulling inspiration from, in order to hone in on my
own visual language and how am I using that visual language to interpret the world around me
in a way that aligns with my methodology? How are these artists not only influencing the ways
in which I work but radically changing the way in which I view and interpret my own world?
Spending time with other artists’ works can drastically change and alter my point of view, in a
powerful way, cause me to question things and change how I interact with people, land, and
the objects around me; altering the ways in which I see. A powerful work of art can allow me to
see things in an entirely new way, which in turn will affect the ways in which I am bringing the
world around me into my own work.

Andrew Wyeth

One of the artists who is most influential for my artistic practice, and whose work I find
incredibly beautiful and inspiring, is Andrew Wyeth. A 20th Century American painter, Wyeth is
known for his melancholic and often poignant depictions of Eastern American rural landscapes,
and their inhabitants. The work focuses on the farmlands, and homes of the rural folks who
lived there, with a predilection for capturing the banal within everyday life. I draw influence
from Wyeth’s paintings, and his method of working in a myriad of ways, most notably within his
landscapes, and his representational style of painting. The majority of his work was made in
the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the 1960’s, which was a time when working
realistically in the art world was out of fashion. In Wyeth’s paintings I find an acute expression
of the emotional breadth in viewing the world through another’s hand and mind. What their

32

eye sees and how they choose to focus on it, in an attempt to better know and convey
themselves and the world, creates such a deep and personal level of knowing the world. Taken
from a writing about Wyeth’s painting techniques by E.P. Richardson in an article from the

Atlantic Monthly, printed in a Catalogue from an exhibition in 1973 at The Fine Arts Museum of
San Francisco . . . Wyeth works with, “ . . . a conviction that the wonder of the objects which
make up this world can be grasped only by the most painstaking and loving study.”
(Richardson)

Another way in which I find my method closely aligned with Wyeth’s is how he chose
what imagery to paint, or where and how he found inspiration for his paintings. Similar to my
practice, it comes from a deeply rooted relationship with walking, and spending time outside,
in order to feel more connected to and better know a place. Through wandering without
distraction, with an openness to listen and experience the world around oneself. In an
interview with Time Magazine printed in 1965, he articulates exactly how I feel about finding
inspiration:

You see, I don’t say, ‘Well, now I’m going to go out and find something to paint,’ To hell
with that. You might just as well stay home and have a good glass of whiskey. Really, I
just walk a great deal over the countryside. I try to leave myself very blank – a kind of
sounding board, all the time very open to catch a vibration, a tone from something or
somebody . . . every so often I’ll catch, out of the corner of my eye, off balance, a flash
impression of something, a spark of excitement. (Meryman 6)

Wyeth goes on to say in the article that these moments will sit with him for days, weeks,
months or even years before he begins to recreate it in his art and I feel so akin to this way of

33

collecting images and information. Nowadays, with the inventions of personal cameras on our
phones and printers, I feel quite lucky that I can be literal with this way of sitting with an image.
I will print out the moments that catch my eye and post them up all over my studio and just set
them there and wait for the moment to come up when I just can’t wait any longer, and the
desire to bring that moment to life in the work becomes overwhelming!

Fig. 11. Andrew Wyeth Plowed Road, 1985

Wyeth also seems to have been drawn to very sparse, monochromatic landscapes,
much like myself. Winter is my favorite season to draw and paint, especially when there is
snow. It adds another layer of gentleness, thoughtfulness and solitude; it speaks volumes. In
that same interview Wyeth also touches on this tendency which we share.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape - the
loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it - the whole
story doesn’t show. I think anything like that which is contemplative, silent, shows a
person alone people always feel is sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone?
(Meryman 6)

34

I am also attracted to Wyeth’s compositional choices, his color palette and his use of
negative space, or emptiness. In Wyeth’s landscape painting entitled, Heavy Snow (1967), all
of these aspects that I noted are wonderfully visible. The composition, in its simplicity is
stunning, and the use of negative space creates such an environment of calm and serenity. The
limited and monochromatic palette and the way that the color of the sky and the hillside
covered in snow are barely discernible to each other. Wyeth’s sparing yet emotional treatments
demonstrate how so much can be said with so little, which is pertinent to the world in which we
live in today. It is a world where there is an ever-increasing amount of noise and activity, so
much to distract ourselves with that as Wyeth states, we’ve lost the art of being alone and also
being alone in silence.

Fig 12. Andrew Wyeth Heavy Snow, 1967

Vija Celmins

Another artist whom I feel my work is connected to is Vija Celmins, her work is
absolutely stunning in its beauty and attention to detail, there is an acknowledgment, an
indebtedness and a similarity between our works which I must recognize. Artists who are

35

creating work today are able to do so because of the growth and effort put in by those artists
that came before them, and the drawings that I am making today are definitely in deep
gratitude for the drawings that Vija Celmins has made. In a lot of respects, she paved the way
for an art form like charcoal drawing to be a stand-alone, to be taken seriously in the art world.

Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia in 1938, she and her family escaped amidst World
War II and moved to America where she still lives and works today. Her early career and
formative years were spent on the west coast, in LA and later she moved to the east coast to
be closer to the art scene in New York City. Her works that I will be referencing are the intimate
and meticulous graphite and charcoal drawings which she made of the ocean. She drew many
subjects in intimate detail including space, the desert, and spider webs but for obvious
reasons, it is these drawings of the ocean that I am particularly attracted to. These were all up
close studies of the surface of things she was fascinated by in the natural world, often lacking a
horizon or a determinate object to place them. She seems to have a fascination with drawn
surfaces which I can wholeheartedly relate to. She had this obsession with staying true to the
tools of her craft, not hiding the fact that it was a drawing by leaving the evidence of the mark
visible but also leaning into the power of representation to create this magical illusion in her
works. Writer Sarah Manguso writes about Celmins’ work in an article for Frieze Magazine:
“What makes her images so alive is the consummate craftsmanship that goes into them . . .
every mark fits with every other mark in a seamless image that refers only to itself.” (Manguso)

36

Fig 13. Vija Celmins Untitled (Ocean), 1977

Celmins is also unapologetic with her use of photographic references in her work, much
the way that I have attempted to be in this writing. She would even use photographs that she
cut out of science magazines to recreate images of the stars in space. She explained that the
finished works were not the photograph; they were a thing wholly unto themselves. In Celmins
own words, during an interview with Calvin Tomkins for The New Yorker Magazine: “Some
people think I just sit down and copy the photograph . . . it is precisely that I reinvent it in other
terms.” (Tomkins)

Celmins is also an avid walker and observer. She was, as many artists are, astute at
noticing. Her studio, for much of her early career, was in Venice Beach and her walks, like my
own, were along the ocean. I believe that in this time spent wandering on the beach she too
saw the beauty in the simple, in leaving space for emptiness in the works. This sense of
gentleness and calm that I am trying to recreate in my own works is clearly evident in hers.
Again, from her interview and article from The New Yorker: “There is a furious fullness about
it, despite the general emptiness. That fullness is the promise that one can look into the abyss
and live.” (Tomkins)

Fig. 14. Vija Celmins Long Ocean, 1973

37

Along with my gratitude for her solidifying a place in the art world for charcoal works to
be taken seriously, I am also grateful for her dedication to representational art. Working in an
era when Modern abstraction still dominated painting and as a woman doing so back in the
1970’s, is very admirable. It is a difficult genre of art to be working in as is, but to be taken
seriously at that time as well as to be so successful, is amazing. I feel such a strong affinity with
Celmins, not only do I find my process aligning with hers in so many ways, but she spends her
days now, living outside of the city, with her cat Raymond whom she lovingly refers to as her
husband and she drives around with him in her 12-year-old Toyota. I think to myself, “me too
Vija, me too”, except my cat is named Matilda and my Toyota is 32 years old, all the same. Let’s
draw oceans together sometime.

Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan is my third and final artist that I would like to share as a part of this writing.
Her work is quite different from Wyeth and Celmin’s, but it still has much in common as far as
mood and aesthetic language goes. Though Adnan is in fact a landscape painter, it is her
poetry that has inspired and influenced my drawings of late. Perhaps it is because she also
speaks in the language of landscape painting that I find her poetry to be so relatable. Etel
Adnan is a Lebanese-American painter, poet and essayist, born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925.
Throughout her life she spent time living primarily in America and France and has had an
incredibly prolific and active life. I am focusing on her poetry but I do believe it stands
mentioning and showing an example of her beautiful landscape paintings. They are so stark
and simplistic, wavering between representational and abstract and her use of color is
stunning.

38

Fig. 15. Etel Adnan Untitled, 2010

Adnan’s poetry consists of meditative observations of the places she lives, mingled with
the thoughts which are at that time flitting through her mind. It reads as a stream of
consciousness, or a collection of streams of consciousness as she wanders about the land,
experiencing and observing the natural world. I find it to be very mindful and meditative,
similar to the ways in which I wander outside looking for inspiration. In fact, reading these
poems has helped me to be more present and focused while out walking, observing what I am
seeing in tandem with what I am thinking and I find it to be a very generative, and therapeutic
exercise, so thoughtful, present and relatable. Almost as if it explains the ways in which I work,
in a way that had not occurred to me before.
It is so affirming to have a kindred spirit in this way of engaging with one’s self and the
landscape through art. Adnan had a rigorous habit of walking, as I myself have and the other
artists I have mentioned in this paper do. I connect to the land this way, and in the act of
walking my mind is free of distraction and better able to be present and engaged. Our
practices overlap in this way and then alongside this state of being, we are both creating
artworks inspired by these wanderings. Her in the form of poetry and myself in the form of
drawing, both practices inspired by walking and interacting with the natural world in a very
present, peaceful sort of way

39

Her collection of poems that I am most excited about is titled, “Sea” and “Fog.” This
book is broken up into two longer sections titled, Sea and Fog. Within those sections are short
writings that all flow together, like the stream of consciousness I mentioned earlier. The Beach
near my home is foggy a lot of the time, as is evidenced in my recent works and reading her
poems while collecting images or looking at images of fog, is almost like my ideas for drawings
have magically turned themselves into words. Here is an example of a poem from her book
which I have been referencing: “In all innocence the fog is touching the tip of the trees. The
forest is silent. It doesn’t mind its invasion by such a light substance. Lighter than a dance, than
a hand.” (Adnan)

I decided to use an image from the book for this next poem of Adnan’s instead of
transcribing it as I feel it is a good representation of another aspect of her poetry that I’m
drawn to. The visual component of the compositions is very important, the way that Adnan is
so conscious of the layout of both words, lines, and the spacing on the page is beautiful. It is
that same concept of negative space that is present in Miyazaki’s films, or Wyeth’s snowy
landscapes. The emptiness speaks just as much as the words themselves, in fact, the
emptiness enhances the poem, the space around it dictates the cadence in which it is read, and
brings it to life.

40

Fig. 16. Page 107 from Sea and Fog, 2012

Though I have an eclectic collection of artistic inspirations, in my own strange mind they
make sense. They are speaking on the same topics, working with the same inspirations but in
very different and exciting ways. We as artists are all trying to make sense of the world around
us, in our own works and occasionally those meandering paths cross or converge and the
sharing of ideas and images in those magical moments is a generous and generative gift and I
am so grateful for all those who are brave enough to create.

41

Conclusion

This endeavor of searching and learning to be more mindful and present through a slow
and intentional art practice has been an incredibly enlightening experience. It has also been an
experience both born of and in response to my sudden change in living situation, dealing with
the difficulties of starting an MFA program, in a new country, and in the depths of a global
pandemic, suddenly finding myself so utterly alone, in a strange new place, making the most
out of a very challenging time in history and in my own life. It has indeed changed the ways in
which I move through the world. It has changed my outlook on life and how I spend my time. I
am very grateful to be embracing a wholesome practice that will be an enriching, lifelong
pursuit, a continuously fulfilling process. Kagge mentions in his book that he often hears from
his older friends that when looking back on their lives, “All those days that came and went. I
didn’t realize those were life.” (Kagge 3). I want to be sure that my work and my art are
lifelong pursuits situated in and embracing the ordinary in the everyday, taking time to “do
nothing”, to move slowly and intentionally and to enjoy the world around me and the time I am
given to exist here. I aim to continue to make time for the practice of walking to really get to
know the places that inspire my landscape drawings, sitting with the seasons, the textures, the
fog and the light, just existing in a state of wonder in these beautiful landscapes that I am so
fortunate to experience. Carrying these precious moments into the studio and with my patient
and skilled hands, bringing these special moments of awareness to life. Through long hours of
slowly building up marks, in a tedious but gentle moving meditation, totally aware of every tiny
mark and how it adds up with every other tiny mark into a magical illusion of these beautiful
landscapes of my wanderings.

42

Images

1.

Stephanie Buer, Jericho Beach I, 31 x 45”, 2021

2. Stephanie Buer, Photo reference, 2022
3. Stephanie Buer, Drawing in Progress, 2021
4. Stephanie Buer, Drawing Detail, 2021
5. Stephanie Buer, Burrard Inlet, 30 x 36”, 2021
6. Stephanie Buer, Smoke I, 17 x 29”, 2020
7. Stephanie Buer, Photograph, The Great Blue Heron, 2022
8. Stephanie Buer, Jericho Beach II, 40 x 31”, 2021
9. Stephanie Buer, Untitled (Fog), 64 x 48”, 2022
10. Stephanie Buer, Untitled, 42 x 56”, 2021
11. Andrew Wyeth, Plowed Road, 1985
12. Andrew Wyeth, Heavy Snow, 1967
13. Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1977
14. Vija Celmins, Long Ocean, 1973
15. Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2010
16. Etel Adnan, Photograph of Page 107 from Sea and Fog, 2012

43

Works Cited

Adnan, Etel. Sea and Fog. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2012. Print.

Han, Byung-Chul, The Burnout Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2015. Print.

Kagge, Erling. Silence in the Age of Noise. New York, NY: Vintage Books. 2017. Print.

Manguso, Sarah. “Artist Vija Celmins ‘Stands at the Lip of the Abyss.’” Frieze. Frieze
Magazine. 18/04/2019. https://www.frieze.com/article/artist-vija-celmins-stands-lip-abyss

Meryman, Richard. “Andrew Wyeth: An Interview.” The Art of Andrew Wyeth. Greenwich, CT.
The New York Graphic Society Ltd. 1973. Print. (Pages 45 – 79)

Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. New York, NY: Melville
House. 2019. Print

Richardson, E.P. “Andrew Wyeth’s Painting Techniques.” The Art of Andrew Wyeth. Greenwich,
CT: The New York Graphic Society Ltd. 1973. Print. (Pages 81 – 90)

Saltz, Jerry, Elizabeth Murray Quote, Instagram, March 16th 2022,
https://www.instagram.com/p/CbKxcSEgaE5/

44

Skerrit, Henry F. Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia.
New York City, NY: Prestel Publishing. 2016. Print.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust, A History of Walking. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2000. Print.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1966. Print. Essay, “Against Interpretation”. pgs. 3-1

Sontag, Susan. On Photography.

Tomkins, Calvin. “Vija Celmins Surface Matters.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker Magazine.
02/09/2019.
https:www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/vija-celmins-surface-matters.com

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1977. Print.

45

Bibliography

Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge; Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.
New York City, NY: Viking Studio, 2006. Print.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the

Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. 2015. Print.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Landscape and Power. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 2002.
Print.

Shaw, George. “A Corner of a Foreign Field.” YouTube. Uploaded by Yale Center for British
Art, 09/10/2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJXg1LZ-Ggk

Wiley, Chris. “From the Furious Sea to the Integral Accident.” Landscapes After Ruskin:

Redefining the Sublime. Munich, Germany: Hirmer Publishers, 2018. Print.

46