Artists
include
Louisa Chambers, Chris Daniels, Lisa Denyer, Andrew
Graves, Trevor Sutton, James Faure Walker, Jonathan Waller, Anthony Whishaw,
Gary Wragg
To draw
is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.
Henri Matisse
James Elkins in correspondence with John Berger wrote
that drawing is the ‘invaluable record of the encounter of a moving, thinking
hand with the mesmerising space of potential forms that it simply called a
“blank sheet of paper”.’ Drawing was once considered in the Western academic
tradition, to be the foundation of art education, and the mother of all the
arts. The importance placed on drawing has been abandoned by most art schools
as an irrelevant activity of a time past. John Elderfield in 1982 described
drawing as the most resistant of all the modern arts to define. This exhibition
takes its focus from the way in which eight painters individually approach
drawing.
John Berger in his essay Life-Drawing (1960) wrote
that ‘drawing is discovery’, for Gary Wragg often drawing is used in a way that
opens new discoveries. Bryan Robertson stated in 1979 that in ‘his best
paintings art seems to take images from his inner life by surprise, and it is
Wragg’s strength as an artist that he transforms the elusive event into a rich
visual celebration’. James Faure Walker works digitally and with water based
paint on a loose sensual level, concentrating on what the paint and colour is
doing and trying to discover a kind of unity within the artwork. For Walker and
Wragg, there is an intention for the works to be deliberately ambivalent and
open for interpretation, structured so they can be pieced together by the
spectator’s imagination in several ways. The structures and figures in Andrew
Graves work hover over off-white grounds, there is often a suggestion of an
interpretation, a collapsed or dismantled box, an architectural model, a
building, but it also suggests and engages with the speed or slowness of its
making, provisional attempts at structure, and a reflection on colour theory.
In Anthony Whishaw’s work there seems to be a constant
‘knife edge’ between figuration and abstraction, the works offer 'a parallel
experience to reality rather than a description of it'. This parallel
experience can be seen in the two drawings on show, they offer up to the
viewer’s eye several readings. The works on show seems to conjure up a kind of
architectural space, such as doors, corridors and windows. These created spaces
animate the surface and direct the eye in and out of the surface of the paper.
Louisa Chambers has also been using drawing as a means of discovery. Drawing’s
role has started to be a catalyst for the development of new areas of
investigation. Her latest works on paper have been produced from a series of
temporary sculptures that she has drawn from. These initial drawings became
water based paintings, in the transformation between the drawing and painting a
synthesis happens on the card that makes the art work something completely
surprising and new. In the English language, the word draw comes from the old
Saxon word dragan which means to drag. Lisa Denyer articulates the surface and
space within her works by dragging elements such as card or painted paper
across the surface into place. Denyer does not have any initial idea sketched
out, she builds the painting up through improvisatory acts.
In his 1857 book The Elements of Drawing John Ruskin
wrote, ‘everything that you see, in the world around you, presents itself to
your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours, variously
shaded.’ Trevor Sutton has been working on paintings lately that are like
breaths of colour. He creates small working drawings, and then delicately works
on the final painting improvising and making changes as he proceeds. Chris
Daniels makes small drawings in paint that act as peremptory sketches for some
of the more designed paintings, these concentrate on the arrangement of marks
and the colour interaction. The drawings in the exhibition by Jonathan Waller
come from a body of work called ‘The Seven Ages of Man’. Both pieces in the
exhibition are on paper, and have some level of painting involved within their
process. Many preparatory drawing are made to formulate an idea and through
this research an idea for a final image is arrived at. Waller starts by working
in charcoal, creating an initial composition of the figure, he then uses a
water based paint to create the beginning of the areas of colour. This
obliterates the charcoal drawing until only a fraction of it is left. He then
builds up the drawing with fine pastels, gradually refining the drawing.
St Thomas More Catholic Comprehensive School
Footscray Road, Eltham London, SE9 2SU
Open Saturdays during term time, 11-3pm
