Through the slow practice of en plein air sketching season, time and place are the principal ideas to be developed in this project by me and the attending participants. Drawing on the Seasons of Pokagon seeks to offer the skills of this kind of language that lets us see with greater detail. Granting these skills, through this project, and the experience of drawing en plein air, allows for increase
d empathy for our foreign wildernesses in general and the wealth of nature that Pokagon State Park has to offer. The identity of a place shines when it meets the changing events of season, weather, sunlight, moonlight and transforming light from dawn to dusk. Strong places, places that we sense have significance, shine
brightest throughout these seasonal and daily changes. The rising, eastern light, appears somewhere that deserves to be remembered. The face of the forest at noon, in autumn, will differ from that remembered in spring in summer. In fall the leaves are more sickly, more transparent and the sky often an opaque grey. Time and season is perennial but reveals itself differently according to and in place. The area that now serves as Pokagon State Park was a significant Glacial geography of kame, fen, lake, meadow and esker before the park itself was designed. Then, this place had a chattering and thriving
community of significance. The preservation of this complexity attests to that older significance. With the design of the park's paths and stone structures by depression era architects and built by area craftsmen these features acquired a voice and told a story within the particular key of the park designers. The designers of Pokagon State Park used the language of path, place and dwelling to speak about what is 'naturally' significant here. Through the practice of a patient drawing onsite any one who attends Pokagon can call upon significance in a manner little different from the architects and craftspeople of Pokagon's construction. When one sits to draw, in a place – in situ – one is forced to think about what has interest and what is significant. Drawing, like architecture, stone masonry, is a language that – using edge and surface – suggests what is there and what needs our attention. This drawing oriented projects will give an oportunity for Pokagon State Park attendees to take a quick dip, or extendent tour into in-situ sketching and pictorial story telling.
