The Yale Divinity Library
is pleased to host a display of sketchbooks and illustrated journals
by former YDS Research Fellow Constance Pierce. Pierce is now associate
professor of painting and drawing at St. Bonaventure University (NY).
In 2007 Pierce 's sketchbooks were featured, for a second time, in an
exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington,
DC. Her work is included in that museum's permanent collection, and
also the Georgetown University Special Collections (DC), the Smithsonian
Institution's Archives of American Art (DC), the National Gallery of
Art Rare Book Library (DC), and the Yale Center for British Art, Prints
and Drawings sketchbook archives among others. Constance has exhibited
regionally and nationally. Her work has been featured in articles and
reviews in the Washington Post, Chicago's New Art Examiner, New York
Times, New Haven Register, Yale Bulletin, and Image: Journal of Art
and Religion. Constance has also designed many "hands-on"
seminars and workshops for institutions and private groups on her original
and special expertise entitled "Imaging Journal: Creative Renewal
and the Inward Journey
Statement by the artist:
Through the intimacy and
informality of my sketchbooks, I am able to record what it is like
to be human at a particular moment, in a specific place, in all the
confluence of time. I often experience the practice of creating sketchbooks
as a spiritual discipline. My sketchbooks remind me of the great particularity
of life. They are my constant companions providing me with solace,
and presenting me with challenge. Across my pages I am able to capture
the fleeting and preserving it; and through the very process of sketching
itself, I am able to offer surrendered attention - an intense awareness
- to the given moment.
Sketchbooks are generally
unplanned, synchronistic and replete with the spontaneous and awkward
vestiges of trial and error. The touch of the texture of the page
or the way the paper responds to watercolor and pen line impacts the
choice of subjects. I routinely engage my sketchbook pages to work
through archetypal concepts for larger paintings, or to record illusive
flashes of vision and dream, or to simply document the moment as it
is observed and lived. Sketchbook keeping may foster a compassionate
awareness, because the practice teaches attention to the soul of the
world, as well as reveals the interior life.
Some of the sketchbooks
in this display were kept during the years I was a research fellow
at Yale Divinity School. I studied collections of sketchbooks at the
Yale Center for British Art, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, and the Yale Art of the Book Collection in Sterling Library.
I often sketched masterworks in the Yale galleries, productions at
the Yale Rep, lunchtime concerts and the ebb and flow of the local
populace at Starbucks or Atticus Bookstore and Café. I filled
several sketcbooks while listening to lectures on Dante by Dr. Peter
Hawkins. A selection of these sketchbooks was exhibited in May of
2007 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.