Tania Kovats and Drawing Water

I'm currently reading Drawing Water by Tania Kovats. It is the most beautiful book. I was hooked from the moment I saw the delicious cover and read the reviews on the Amazon website. Now I have it, it is such a pleasure to thumb through and it feels so good in the hand.

The book is, at heart, an exploration of the wonder and fascination of the sea and all things connected with it alongside ways of representing it.  As well as providing her own explanations and context, Kovats approaches the subject through extracts from the poems, writing and accounts of a range of other writers.

Perhaps most interesting for me, she illustrates the whole with an unusual mix of carefully and sparingly chosen art works. She includes many of her own abstract works - all lovely. This book was an introduction for me to her subtle work.

Alongside these delights, there are maps and charts, plans and diagrams, and drawings, paintings and installations that range from two lovely watercolour sketches by JWM Turner, through the drawing of the design for the Forth Road Bridge near Edinburgh in Scotland to work by many modern artists that are new to me.

She writes throughout in a most thought-provoking way about the process and purpose of drawing which I am finding particularly interesting. She says that for her, Drawing is a mechanism for exploration as much as a tool of representation.  She explains  I draw to find my way out. Drawing fills the space when I'm not sure what I'm doing. It's ... my search engine. 

It is a book to savour and enjoy in small doses so that each revelation is given full weight and the quirky can be appreciated. I read it two or three pages at a sitting, often in the morning as I sit in bed with my first cup of tea. Then I think about what I've seen and read in idle moments over the course of the day  ... such pleasures ...

...and those words I draw to find my way out ...  now they really are something to think about!