I’ ve just got back from a wonderful weekend focused on drawing …
First stop the opening of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize at Salisbury Museum. It was interesting to see all the work in a different space – mine had one of the same neighbours as in London. Had a wonderful chance meeting with two artists and an opportunity to talk about the process behind my drawing.
Then the next day we took in Salisbury Cathedral and I managed to catch a demo of the clock. Great to see Barbara Hepworth’s piece Construction (Crucifixion): Homage to Mondrian back on permanent display in the South East corner of the Cloister Garth.
I visited Drawing Projects UK for the first time and saw Simon Woolham’s installation and drawings, Drawing Out the Canal, and enjoyed his performance with Nick Sorensen & Joanna Harvey – a wonderfully melodic, poetic and political extension to the work, which I really loved seeing for real after only seeing it online.
Finally I went to 2B or not 2B at Messums Wiltshire with Anita Taylor, Charles Poulsen, Alice Motte-Muñoz and David Alston. Fortunately the discussion did not get stuck around “no-one teaches drawing any more.” I’d have liked to hear more about what makes a good drawing but there was plenty to think about in the attempts to define what drawing is or what qualities make a drawing a drawing … immediacy, intimacy (drawing is different from painting in that painting always has a public end), the “left trace’ (evidence), thought in action, a relationship between 2 points, material thinking, touch of a surface, beginning to end of a thought, …. which left some in the audience struggling to get to grips with the wide spectrum of definitions and others nodding in agreement. I wonder what the balance of artists to general public was in the audience.
Anita Taylor pointed out that we call everything from documentary reports to Sanskrit texts writing!
