‘I DRAW’

Here is a drawing I worked on in 2011-2012.  It will be on show, for just a few hours in a Church in Folkestone on Thursday afternoon.

Thursday will be the 100th anniversary of ‘The Great Folkestone Air Raid’ of 25th May 1917.  The people organising a memorial event have asked me to show this drawing as part of the day’s commemorations.  This work is about the people who were killed by a bomb which exploded amidst a queue of people standing outside Stokes’ greengrocers in Tontine Street at about 6.22pm on 25th May 1917.

The drawing consists of sixty-eight small panels containing drawings of some of the people who were killed and handwritten text listing their names, ages, cause of death and, perhaps some other details about them.  Where there is no visual reference for their appearance to draw from there is simply text.  The title of the piece – “They looked like silver birds. The sun was shining on them…” – comes from an eye witness account of seeing the German Gotha bombers high up in the late afternoon sunlight just a few moments before the bomb was dropped on Tontine Street.

This work is part of an occasional ongoing body of work about the victims of the 25th May 1917 Folkestone Air Raid.  It is ‘occasionally ongoing’ partly due to lack of time and money needed to make the work I’d like to make but partly also because of the upsetting subject matter of the work; it’s emotionally difficult to concentrate on such a sad story for long periods of time.  I made this work because I wanted people to know about this story as it seemed as though it might soon be forgotten.  The story itself is sad but it can have a bigger meaning in that it can stand for similar stories we hear about in the news all the time.

This particular drawing has been seen in various galleries around the country including The Jerwood Space in London, The Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, Plymouth Arts Centre/Plymouth College of Art, The Sidney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury (all these as part of the 2013 Jerwood Drawing Prize) as well as in my hometown of Margate (at The Pie Factory Gallery and East Kent Artists Open Houses).  At last it will be seen in Folkestone.

In Folkestone it will be displayed on a table in a church rather than in the more usual ‘white cube’ style gallery space.  Ordinarily I might worry about the placing of this work, but on Thursday the overriding significance of its placing will be its presence in the town of Folkestone.  Some of the relatives of the victims of the air raid will also be present.

The medium of the drawing is silverpoint on gesso.  Silverpoint drawings are literally the traces of metal drawn over a prepared surface (similar to the sort of mark you might make if you were to drag a coin across an emulsion-painted wall).  It’s an extremely subtle drawing medium which leaves an ever-so-slight trace of its touch upon the surface.  It’s a gentle medium but the mark it leaves is indelible.  Its delicacy and its quality of ‘trace’, which this medium brings to the fore, make it an appropriate medium for an art about memory and presence.

The exhibition opens at 2pm at The Folkestone Methodist Church on Sandgate Road (CT20 2DA).   I shall be at the Methodist Church to talk about the work from 2pm until 5pm.  Come along and say hello if you can make it along to Folkestone on Thursday afternoon.

You might also find the BBC Radio 4 drama series ‘Home Front’ interesting in relation to this too.

The day’s events have been organised by the local historian, Martin Easdown, and a descendent of one of the victims, Margaret Care – this is a labour of love.

For more information about the Folkestone air raid memorial service go to: http://www.leshaigh.co.uk/folkestone/tontinememorialservice.html

For more information about my work go to my various social media places listed below:

Blog: https://royeastland.wordpress.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/royeastlanddraw

Blog: https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/i-draw

Facebook: https://royeastland.wordpress.com/

Blog: https://www.facebook.com/Roy-Eastland-1495390357351370/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/royeastland/

To draw is to take time to pay attention to the presence of something.  This drawing is one of a series of metalpoint drawings based on photo booth portraits.

My artworks tend to focus on themes to do with memory and presence; silverpoint drawings (literally the trace of a point the metal across a prepared surface) is the perfect medium to suit my ideas.  All hand-made drawings are mediums of trace but I think metalpoint drawings emphasise this characteristic in a particularly sensitive and beautiful way.

It isn’t possible to capture the subtleties of the silverpoint medium in scans or in photographs and so I’ve taken a few photographs here from different angles to try to give some idea of how these drawings look in real life.  This piece is about the size of a sheet of A5.

These are drawings of little, otherwise unimportant, moments of a life.  Here was a point in time in which someone was present.  My drawings are a kind of souvenir of these little, lived, moments.

‘Margate Landlady’

Work-in-progress.  One of a number of silverpoint drawings based on people in an old photograph from Margate.

Note: any similarity to any B&B owners currently living in Margate or Cliftonville is purely coincidental.

This drawing is from 2009.  It’s called: “What wouldn’t I give grow old in a place like that…” (the title comes from a line spoken by one of the characters in the 1940s Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale).

The drawing is based on a short sequence in the film and it was to be one of a set of drawings which was also to include a series of drawings of people who make their accidental appearances in the film as passers by.  This wasn’t to be.  This is the only drawing to have survived or to have come to some kind of completion and to have been exhibited as a finished work of art (it was shown at Beaux Arts gallery in Bath).  The medium is silver on gesso on board, and it’s approximately 7cm x 5cm in size.  Most of my work is small – often it’s very small.  You have to look into them close up as well as from a distance.  It’s still in my mind to find some way to work on the drawings of the passers-by.  Perhaps this’ll happen one day.

The final blog post for the ‘Armchair Artist Residency’.

The Beaney House of Knowledge and Art: The Front Room ‘Armchair Artist Residency’ blog.

Blog number six, February 2014:

In a cardboard box on a shelf in the museum storerooms there is an ancient flint hand axe with a distinctive loop-design at its pointed end.  The loop is a naturally occurring feature within the rock itself but someone knapped the flint in such a way as to place it just so.  I held it and it fitted my right hand perfectly (it felt wrong in my left hand).  My fingers found the indentations around its edge and my thumb settled in a shallow concave dip in its surface.  It felt to me like a craft tool.  I wondered why I found its looping line so pleasing.  Maybe it’s because I recognise in it evidence of that familiar human habit of creative self-expression and play: that urge to transform mindless inanimate material into things with meanings and significance or simply to make them look more interesting.  That museum object has been haunting my thoughts.  It was made to be useful but the deliberateness of the placing of that loop also expressed a side to someone’s imagination and their pleasure in making something.  Museum objects make you think.  My ‘works of art’ have no use beyond that of being ‘works of art’ and I wonder about their place in the world of contemporary art.

I’ve come to the end of my time as ‘The Front Room Artist Armchair Resident’.  The brief was simply to “…be inspired by the collections, the people, the place and the stories.”  It didn’t involve a commission to make works of art.  I was simply expected to make visits to the museum and to write six blogs about my experience.  I spent time looking at the museum objects (the stained glass window on the stairs and the ‘Saxon’ disc broche are particular favourites of mine) and I drew various museum objects to see what my drawings made of them (I’ve written about this in previous blogs).  My exhibition in The Drawing Room was a fantastic and unexpected extra to my time as ‘The Armchair Resident’ and it gave me an opportunity to show sketchbook-drawings alongside some of the drawings I had done in the museum.

The residency gave me an excuse to muse on my relationship with the museum and with the town of Canterbury.  A visit to the Canterbury always used to involve spending some time in the cathedral.  When I was little I loved to go there with my Mum.  It was a place to find perspective.  I can’t afford to go there these days (the entrance cost is extortionate) and so, sadly, it no longer plays a part in my life and I miss it.  But then, maybe, the act of Drawing is a kind of prayer, a reaching-out, or at least a kind of meditation.  This might sound silly but I mean this in the sense that Drawing is an act of paying quiet attention to the presence of something outside of your self.  When you draw, you have to be open to the possibility of changing your mind about what you think you are in the presence of.  Good lines are Drawing’s simple blessings – these are the lines that are better than the ones you might have been able to foresee.  They’re the ones that say: ‘Look, it could also be like this!’  You can’t consciously force the good lines into being; they can only come into play when you’re deeply engaged in making sense of the presence of a thing through Drawing.  People who draw will understand this (we walk amongst you and we are legion!).

It’s been difficult but interesting trying to find the words to describe my thoughts and so I’ll end with a quote from John Berger’s book, Berger on Drawing in which he also acknowledges how hard it is to write about art:

‘ALL GENUINE ART approaches something which is eloquent but which we cannot altogether understand.  Eloquent because it touches something fundamental.  How do we know?  We do not know.  We simply recognize.  Art cannot be used to explain the mysteries.  What art does is to make it easier to notice.  Art uncovers the mysterious.  And when noticed and uncovered, it becomes more mysterious.  I suspect writing about art is a vanity, leading to sentences like the above.  When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision.  Impasse‘.

Thank you to the people at The Beaney for having me as the ‘Front Room Artist Armchair Resident’ and thank you for giving me the chance to exhibit my drawings in The Drawing Room gallery.  If I could have afforded the time and bus fairs it would have been interesting to have drawn everyone who works in the museum and make museum objects of you.

…and finally, will the person who pinched the folder from The Drawing Room please return it (the Beaney put together a couple of information folders to go along with my exhibition in The Drawing Room).  I am extremely flattered to think that someone wanted one so much that they turned to a life of crime to get one but The Beaney can’t afford to lose their posh folders.  You’re very welcome to keep the pages but if you can use your stealth and criminal genius to put the empty folder back that would be nice.

Thank you for reading these blogs.  I wish you all Good Drawing (and if you think you can’t draw, come to my drawing classes in Margate and I’ll prove you wrong)!

In re-posting these blogs I’ve had to tweak a few sentences here and there but mostly these are as they were originally published for the Beaney’s website.  I’ve re-posted them here because they are no longer to be found there.  These are not works of great literature but I think there are some good ideas in them (I think the firs two blog posts aren’t too bad).  Since doing this Artist Residency I’ve continued to develop some of the ideas I was working on at the time and you can find more images and posts about my art-work on this ‘a-n’ blog, my wordpress blog (https://royeastland.wordpress.com) and on my facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/Roy-Eastland-1495390357351370/).