- Venue
- Rumbelow Gallery at Great Yarmouth Community Library until 5th November
- Location
- East England
If ‘Art is personality’ as Lin Yutang suggests in his book the Importance of Living then the work by Dick Whall hanging in the Rumbelow Gallery, Great Yarmouth is an example of a multi layered personality accessed easily from a series of intricate pencil drawings as he examines his present and future. The black and white images dense with detail and stringent perspective are surrounded by text describing his thought processes, the theory behind the thinking and the art historical context in which the theory has arisen, reflecting the decades that Dick Whall spent teaching Fine Art in the USA and Britain.
Literary, botanical and archeological references reveal further ideas and the revolution of the earth is charted. It becomes clear by the suggested religiosity of the titles that this is a man expressing the movement of detaching from his loved ones, his desire to know his surroundings, his wish to face himself, his illness and his death by drawing. Thus, the exhibition is an ode to the power of drawing to express, to know, to reorganize the mind and in this case in the contemplation of death.
The overall feel of the exhibition is calm, quiet and elegant. The touches of humour, the density of inquiry and the text brimming with information reveals a continued zest for life.
