Bonnard’s Landscape Sketches

Pierre Bonnard was an avid sketcher, filling countless sketchbooks and scraps of paper with drawings he would later peruse for painting inspiration when in his studio.

From a previous V. Note: Bonnard did not paint from direct observation. He said he felt ‘weak in front of nature. …The presence of the object, the motif, is very cramping for the painter at the moment of painting. The point of departure for a painting being an idea — if the object is there at the time of working, there is always a danger for the artist to allow himself to be too involved in the incidences of the direct view, and in so doing to lose the initial idea.’ Instead of painting from direct observation, he painted from his drawings, and the memory stored within them.

This process of sketching on site and then painting without the view of nature allowed Bonnard to “digest” the image artistically in two stages: first translating what he saw into his own language of marks, allowing shapes to form a nuanced grid that straightens curves and rounds right angles. Typically a painter differentiates shapes by applying light and dark values, but here Bonnard distinguishes each shape by its own language of marks. See how many different marks he can make with a dull little pencil! The scene is transformed a second time as these marks are translated into reverberating colors. Painter Patrick Heron compared the effect to the way a spider’s web holds raindrops. (Source)

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