St. Tammany artist takes us to France

The charming title "Un Petit Aperçu de France" announces a little glimpse of a specific place through the eyes of St. Tammany artist Peg Usner.

Paintings and drawings, using Berol Prismacolor pencils and Conté crayons on Canson archival paper, travel to Madisonville in October. This collection of 33 drawings and paintings on a small, intimate scale, sized 4.5 inches x 6.5 inches, will be displayed on the north shore for the first time.

Usner's drawings reflect her interest in the once popular tradition of the travel diary.

One characteristic of art in portable folios is the use of materials suited for travel, most often, pencil, watercolor, oil crayons, and paper.

These tools are light, easy to pack and well suited to capture the responses of travelers to their environment within a short period of time. The richness of such diaries is discovered when viewing them as the quick studies they were meant to be.

That first glimpse, which exists in a compressed moment in time, recorded by a particular person working with graphic media, is almost a lost form of art. Perhaps it was, in centuries past, that travelers felt freer to creatively express themselves visually using traditional materials. It mattered little whether they were artists. Their travels gave them an opportunity to yield to the impulse of the moment.

Eventually, the popularity of the camera, and its ability to document in a truly specific way, became the ubiquitous tool for recording details, and most people abandoned the quick study. Though sketching required speed, it could never compete with the speed of the shutter. Over time, this method of working was left almost exclusively to artists.

There is a certain grace to the travel diary as it records a journey through time, and it was a return after 25 years to France during the summer of 2009 that provided the impulse and the inspiration for Peg Usner to record personal observations....