Photos by Chris Sorensen

Luminous Details

Katherine Vetne (CFA’09) uses the Renaissance art of metalpoint to render unsettling still lifes

We just made some little marks,” says Vetne (’09). “And I fell in love.”

Metalpoint predates the invention of pencils. Medieval artists sketched with metal on parchment, and the practice thrived during the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci’s Bust of a Warrior, which he drew with silver on prepared paper, remains a classic of the art form.

Those few minutes in class were formative for Vetne, who has been creating metalpoint still life drawings for more than a decade. “Everyone was making really colorful, gestural paintings—that’s the legacy that BU is known for—but there was something I didn’t relate to,” she says.

“Metalpoint cut out all of that extra noise. Limiting your choices so much, with these delicate lines, was exactly the place I wanted to start from.”

Still Life with Backstory

Vetne is drawn to objects tied to social customs, celebrations, and wealth. She used to search strangers’ wedding registries for inspiration. Once, she bought a $200 butter dish, made of heavy cut crystal, from the registry of a bride-to-be who shared her first name and last initial. It became the focus of a gold and silverpoint drawing, The Comforting Weight and Clarity of Waterford’s Fine Crystal.

“The people behind the registry [were] a kind of alter ego,” she says.

Vetne sets up a still life scene in her Brooklyn, N.Y., studio. Before she begins a piece, she prepares by taking meticulous photos of her subject and projecting them on a wall before glueing, gessoing, and sanding down her pane.

Her drawings have evolved from solitary items to more complex compositions. “I’ve been thinking about being a guest at a dinner party where something has gone a little wrong. It’s this in-between moment where you’re waiting for the fallout.”

Her imagined dinner parties eschew traditional place settings for unlikely combinations of items, which she arranges to suggest chaos. Objects are strewn, details distorted. Her shadows create an unsettling mood, heightening the drama.

Once Vetne starts the metal pointing process, a piece can take up to four months to finish.

Vetne often has politics on her mind, and those themes emerge in her art as well. In The Hunt, a cologne bottle in the shape of a Julius Caesar bust, a silver meat tenderizer, porcelain flowers, and a sharp seafood fork surround the toppled figure of a soldier on horseback.

The Hunt tells the story of a fallen empire through a chaotic composition that suggests an ending. The flowers could be those thrown onstage after a performance—or left atop a grave. “My work is very metaphorical for current ideologies and their failures,” Vetne says.

Traditional Methods

Each of Vetne’s pieces has two beginnings: there is the collection of objects—which can take years to amass—and then the creation of art from them. She seeks items with a certain provenance, like Capodimonte porcelain and Fenton Art Glass. Other objects, like the Caesar bottle, catch her eye as she browses. “I spend a lot of time plugging random things into eBay and seeing what pops up,” she says.

Her acquisitions sit on a studio shelf until she decides how to incorporate them into her work. Two years ago, Vetne purchased a glass cologne bottle shaped like a gun. “I don’t know what to do with this, but I love it,” she says. “It speaks to so many interesting parts of our social conditioning and culture.”

Vetne stages her scenes on a fold-up table in her Brooklyn, N.Y., studio. She takes photographs, adjusts lighting, shifts objects, and photographs again until she’s happy. Then she projects the final photo onto a wall to determine scale. She tends to work slightly larger than life.

Next, Vetne prepares her surface. She adheres a layer of cotton muslin to a wood panel and then, after prepping a premixed chalk gesso—similar to the one she learned to make at CFA—she brushes up to a dozen layers onto the panel and sands it smooth. She likes creating her surface in a traditional way, rather than working with a store-bought ground. “It feels like a piece of marble and has almost a luminescence to it,” she says of the finished panel.

Vetne is inspired by opulence laced with a thread of unease, like “a dinner party where something has gone wrong.”

After projecting her source image on the panel to trace an outline, Vetne is ready to draw. She uses a stylus that holds a short piece of gold wire. The metal is so hard, she can work for several months without filing the tip. She prefers gold because it creates cold gray lines that don’t oxidize or tarnish to a warm hue the way silverpoint does.

Her drawings, rendered in minute detail with thousands of thin lines, have a distinct look. “You have a very limited value range, so no matter how hard you press, your marks are never going to get really dark,” Vetne says. To add shading, she uses a homemade brush—a wad of aluminum wool stuffed into the end of a metal tube. Sometimes, to create heavier lines and darker shadows, she uses graphite.

“Metal makes a delicate, luminous line quality like no other,” she says. “Metalpoint drawings have a little bit of a glow to them.”

A Mysterious Process

Despite metalpoint’s centuries-long history, few artists continue to practice the form. “There’s a very small community, there’s a few books,” Vetne says.

A couple of years ago, she lost two weeks of work when a drawing just vanished. “I rendered the whole object, then I left the drawing for a couple of weeks to work on a different one,” she says. When she returned to it, she found a ghost of her original drawing on the chalk gesso ground. It took a year to solve the mystery. Eventually, she tracked down a former conservator at the British Museum who cracked the case: Vetne had drawn with a nickel-silver blend that included copper. “Copper can oxidize to a few different colors. It can turn green, as on the Statue of Liberty,” she says. “Or it can turn translucent white.” She hasn’t made that mistake again.

“There’s not a ton of information out there to help you figure out why this wild, unpredictable thing happened to your drawing,” she says.

Vetne’s process is painstaking and time-consuming. She estimates she spends one to four months on each piece. “I joke that I have a toxic relationship with my artwork, but I keep coming back to this way of working,” she says. “I love the way images look when they’re built up slowly over time.”

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