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INTRODUCTION

John Berger (1926- ) in a letter to James Elkins wrote

As the act of drawing is now understood it leads us back to the Renaissance. Drawing as I understand it is, however, far older than any written language or architecture. It is as old as song … drawing is fundamental to the energy that makes us human’

Drawing dates back to the Neolithic cave images, it is a form of magic; we draw a line on paper, space and form appear, the line is transformed into an image of the visual world. The instinct to draw is deep seated in the human psyche, our natural instinct, as children, is to delineate, to draw a line around our ideas and imaginings.

Drawing describes its own making, it records its own process, the checks, the errors, the accentuations, the eliminations even, may remain within the image; the character of the process is integral to the image.  The manual activity characterises the drawing, and supports the image. This characteristic may be identified in other art forms, but is particularly a characteristic of drawing.

What follows is primarily about drawing. Making the website has allowed me to review and organize recent work in which there has always been some focus on figurative drawing. Most recent exhibited work has been almost exclusively of large drawings, sequences of heads and landscapes, clearly figurative in character, employing traditional mimetic conventions, but a great deal of smaller scale development work has been produced in notebooks parallel to the exhibited drawings. Also included are larger scale mixed media works made in the last decade with occasional reference to earlier work. An attempt is also made in the ‘Writing’ pages to discuss some of the questions and problems raised around the idea of ‘depiction’ – how we represent forms and express feelings within a drawing or painting – influenced by Michael Podro’s book (Depiction). Included are some analyses of individual drawings, with only brief reference to historical context or stylistic development, considered primarily as depiction. Some photographic projects from this year are also included.

 

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• To select a topic hover on ‘Drawing and Mixed Media‘ and ‘Problems in Descriptions and  Analysis’ and click on selected topic.
• Click on ‘Photographs’ to view.
• To negotiate the Galleries click on individual pictures to enlarge and use ‘previous’ and ‘next’. To return to the Gallery as a whole use ‘back arrow’ at top of screen.