Lican Ray (Mapudungun for “flower rock”) is a magical little town on the shores of lake Calafquén in southern Chile, deep in Mapuche territory. My family owns a summer home and I spent every summer of my childhood there. It is where I learned to walk and swim, and where I fell deeply in love with nature. In December 2022 I returned to Lican Ray for a month-long stay after decades of living abroad. It was an emotional reunion: little had changed—I knew the trees, the bends in the shore, and they knew me.
The yard surrounding our house is home to mature endemic trees such as canelos (the sacred Mapuche tree), lingues, and avellanos (Chilean hazelnuts), as well as some introduced species like walnuts. I was excited to start a new drawing for my graphite series on Chilean plants, a project I started in 2021 and whose first drawing, a Chilean cactus, was featured on the cover of the ASBA 25th Annual International Exhibition catalog. I spent days sitting and walking around the yard looking at the various trees and imagining what they would look like when portrayed in a graphite drawing. I photographed the plants and played around with several ideas, looking for the right composition. It is important to me to not only depict the plant realistically, but also to convey a strong sense of light and, hopefully, elicit an emotional response from the viewer. I ended up choosing the avellanas because of their beautiful fruit and because the trees occupy a large space in my childhood memories.
The drawing is 8 by 8 inches, on a Bristol board. I used Staedtler Mars Lumograph graphite pencils ranging from 2B to 7H. I started the drawing around the summer solstice here in the southern hemisphere, December 21, when the hazelnuts are a pale green. Later in the summer, they turn bright red and eventually a deep purple, almost black. But at that time, the gentle rolling of the light over the form of the nuts was a delight to render and I spent many weeks slowly building up the layers of graphite to create smooth transitions.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend time and draw in Lican Ray, and want to acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Mapuche on which this tree grows.