artist carol heft: "bus ride" drawings

Carol Heft’s landscape drawings are stunning, and she loves making them. Teaching at several schools, in the Lehigh Valley, and in New York City, she travels by bus back and forth a couple of times a week. According to Carol, “I don’t know when I started doing it, it’s a couple of years now, but at some point I started looking out the window and drawing. The irony is that with my academic background, I always thought conditions had to be ideal in order to do good work. Good lighting, appropriate easel and drawing materials, quiet room, lots of time.

The bus is none of those things, except it is two uninterrupted hours of looking out the window and drawing.” Carol believes that some of her best work has been done this way. The drawings are very spontaneous. The landscape is moving past very quickly. She seems to be able to latch on to a configuration of trees, bushes, part of the sky or road, and a composition starts to fall into place.

Occasionally she will work on a drawing two or three times, but mostly they are done during the two hour ride; the drawings are essentially done from memory. Memory of a moving landscape comprised of infinite pieces, sensations, marks, light, foliage, topography, color, texture and gesture. It is a strange kind of memory drawing that is informed by observation. Carol says she hope to continue this practice as long as she can; “I love the landscape, the trees, and I feel like I am a part of it when I draw.”

Another interesting thing about the drawings, is that they are popular. When they started piling up under her desk, Carol decided to give them away, or sell them for very little money; just enough to pay for her bus tickets and postage when she sent them to their new owners. Her drawings are sold by Siriana Lapietra in her gallery in Florence, Italy, at a reasonable and negotiable price. “Knowing that people all over the world are enjoying my work”, says Carol, “is an indescribable pleasure.”