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Some artists like to portray the big picture of nature: towering waterfalls, majestic mountains and expansive plains. Sarah Morejohn prefers a more microscopic approach to depicting flora and fauna, as seen in her solo show of drawings, “Attentive Blooms: Future Transformations,” on view at Bryant Street Gallery through July 17.
Gallery owner Karen Imperial found Morejohn on Instagram and said she was immediately impressed by the intricacies of her work. “I loved the blues, and I am drawn to florals, so she was a hit with me,” Imperial said. She included her in a group show last year where Morejohn’s drawings garnered a great response.
Morejohn currently lives in Oakland but was raised in rural Oregon. In an email interview Morejohn said that she was not exposed to much art while growing up but was “always drawing.” She set off for the University of Oregon with a plan to study nursing but found that her latent interest in art took over. She earned a BFA in painting and drawing in 2011 and ever since has been pursuing a career in the field, which has included an artist’s residency at a nature sanctuary. She credits her parents for her ability to look closely at her surroundings,
“My mom and dad pay acute attention to plants, animals and patterns and that rubbed off on me,” she said.
That attention to detail is certainly a hallmark of this exhibition. What might appear at first glance to be whirling, swirling bursts of indigo blue becomes, upon closer inspection, extremely detailed drawings that demand time to decode and decipher. There are recognizable objects like flowers, branches, leaves and strawberries. But these known quantities are enmeshed in thousands of lines, circles and hatch marks that create an almost psychedelic version of the natural world.
“I use dip pens, acrylic or India ink to draw the lines, and then I use either colored pencils or watercolor to build up the color. Dip pens are great because they make all sorts of drippy problems.”
There don’t seem to be any “problems” to the casual viewer but rather an extremely well-honed eye for detail and cohesion of disparate elements. In “Orange Berries,” a kaleidoscope of blue-hued leaves and branches combine and intertwine to form a backdrop for the delicately rendered fruit. In “Strawberry Lightning,” those same natural elements seem to float placidly in the center of the drawing, but look to the right and bold, exaggerated diagonals form the lightning bolt about to strike.
The sheer number of strokes necessary to create these drawings is amazing and had to inspire the question as to whether she is innately detail-oriented. “That’s funny,” she responded, “I don’t think of myself as a hyper-organized person at all, but I guess I must be.”
Morejohn explained her working method: “It’s a combination of having an idea of what I’d like to focus on and letting things happen. There’s a back and forth between one line leading to the next and a stepping back and thinking about how things could connect.”
That feeling of interconnectedness is a strong theme in her work. She has a favorite motif found in nature, the raindrop. Whether it is incorporated into the whole or highlighted as it is in “Oh No, Rounded Snow,” the familiar shape is more to the artist than just a droplet of water. “In my mind I am playing with the shape of a cartoony raindrop and sometimes imagining the bits of dust or microorganisms that travel within precipitation.”
She has a similarly scholarly take on snowflakes. Often depicted as simple and symmetrical, Morejohn found that she preferred how Robert Hooke drew them in his 17th-century study “Micrographia.” “There’s a page in the book that has renderings of a variety of snow crystals and also this out of place polygon with lines running through it. Maybe it was just a piece of ice, I don’t know. But I’ve played with and thought about that shape and its inner lines since then.”
The complexity of nature and the multitude of components that make up an organic whole are clearly a source of inspiration for Morejohn. In addition to the time and care it takes to create these drawings using ink, colored pencil and watercolor, she adds a further step by cutting and collaging. It is a subtle effect which can only be observed by looking carefully at the layers and cut out areas in works like “February” and “Perfection.”
“The large collaged drawings take more time and more thinking to arrange into something that makes sense. Plus making the decision to cut out a drawing takes some time to decide on. I don’t do it without some hesitation.”
Morejohn explained that she usually works on several drawings at once and each one can take about a month to complete. And how does she know when a work is done?
“I don’t. Especially with the collaged drawings, they seem like they could go on forever. I could just keep adding things. But there does come a point when the composition just works and I stop.”
While Morejohn’s drawings can be enjoyed at a distance for their color and design qualities, it really does require some time and close viewing to take in and appreciate her precision and skill as a draftsman. In our immediate-gratification world, does she think that people have the capacity to do that?
“To be slow, to take notice of things, to find connections is of interest to me. Even I struggle with going too fast in this digital, social media-fueled era. Yes, I hope people slow down to look and notice, but I think people already have that response with my work. I think we all crave something slower.”
“Attentive Blooms, Future Transformations,” a solo show of works by Sarah Morejohn, is on view through July 17 at Bryant Street Gallery, 532 Bryant St., Palo Alto. bryantstreet.com.