We’re excited to announce the release of “nolevelon: the charcoal drawings.” While finalizing the full-color publication documenting five years of design for a sculpture garden and nature preserve in Muskoka, this black-and-white edition spotlights my charcoal illustrations from the same period.

Walking a Tale, Reading a Trail

The book is organized to reflect one’s movement through the wilderness preserve. Like the site and it’s walking paths, it is structured in three distinct realms, where the reader progresses like a hiker on a continuous journey of discovery.

Why Charcoal?

Of the many artistic mediums I could have chosen to represent my designs, I selected charcoal. My goal was to convey the emotional impact that these sculptures would have on the viewer as they were discovered along the darkened trails. I knew that depicting them under the cover of darkness would add drama to the scenes I was creating, and by drawing with charcoal, this effect would be amplified.

I focused on the tonal relationships between the sculptural interventions and the surrounding landscape, as each scene is illuminated by natural and man-made sources. The forest is also transformed by this illumination, and I strove to convey how these dramatic effects would create an otherworldly experience for the hiker.

Designing the Book

In designing the publication, Stephen Jones, an intern architect at the firm, and I were mindful of the impact of black and white photography compared to the full-color images we had utilized within the larger publication.

Converting colored images to black and white often yielded ineffective results, so we opted to limit photos, using them only when necessary to convey the journey’s narrative structure and where charcoal illustrations fell short. Limiting photographs also allowed us to allocate more space for all the best charcoal illustrations that I had prepared for the preserve.

Book Launch at the Toronto Botanical Garden

This book will be available for purchase at my presentation, Pruned, Tangled and Wild, at the Toronto Botanical Garden on March 28th, 2024. At this lecture, I will be presenting three landscapes that I have nurtured for decades. There, I will describe how I have engaged the natural world in very different ways for each.

While the first two are easily understood a gardens, one a perfectly pruned personal backyard garden in the city, and the other a semi-wild cottage garden for my parents, the third landscape is something clearly different. Within a large wilderness preserve in Muskoka, that I have named nolevelon, the natural world exists without human intervention. This landscape is the focus of the book, as well as the talk, since the master plan to create it is much larger than the other two, with a more robust program of uses.

If you can’t attend the March 28th lecture, this book, featuring many of the images that I will be presenting, will be available by contacting our office. We’ve organized its contents to engage the reader. The narrative structure we’ve created, with the placement of the charcoal drawings in chronological order as they would be viewed within the forest, will take you on a journey. Our hope is that while the real-life experience of walking the trails may be years away, these charcoal illustrations will inspire you to imagine yourself exploring the wilderness of nolevelon today.