Thinking Through Drawing, artist talk by Paul Coldwell
29 Oct. 2024
Paul Coldwell gave a lecture on the multiple approaches to drawing. He referred to artists with disciplined drawing practices alongside their 'completed' artworks, which tell something about their personal lives. Here are a few notes from the lecture that I resonated with.
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on drawing the everyday- still life
... drawing from memory vs. drawing from life
- a 'visual essay' on how we try to understand the world, through symbolic objects of thoughts one might be having.
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Phillip Guston, The Street , lithograph on paper (570x764mm). 1970
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Philip Guston (1913-1980)
The Street, lithograph on paper (570x764mm), 1970.
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- simple objects,
- sense of noise and activity
- 'the random'
- floating rectangles, building blocks/bricks? The city being 'pressured'
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I resonate with this piece not only because of the lithography medium used but also because of Guston's style of simplistic shapes and details that invoke anxiety, chaos, and tension in building an ever-so-changing environment, but through a comical way.
Coldwell also discusses how Guston's work was displayed exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2024, a timeline of political turbulence he witnessed/experienced and capturing his emotions through imagery in his drawings/prints/paintings.
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Kathe Kollovitz (1867-1945)
(image on the left) Self-Portrait, woodcut, 1924
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- The resilience of the woodcut, carving out the negative spaces to define the lines of a self-portrait
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I like the transferred wood grains peeping through the black rolled ink of the woodcut, and the carved white areas act in service of expressing a raw intimacy of herself as the subject of exposure...
Researching her background, I feel that the evolving self-portraits communicate the hardships of poverty, hunger, and death that Kollovitz suffered throughout her life.
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In her early years these works reflect her endeavours to assert herself, but as she gained more life-experience, she increasingly focussed on carving out the essence of her personality and on using her studies of her own appearance to explore human nature. She did this by representing her physiognomy in a self-critical, unflattering and expressive manner.​
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What I took from this presentation was not only how the personal lives of these artists take hold of creating an image but also the ambivalence of drawing as a practice. The critical and spiritual possibilities that can come out of the act of drawing and how we trust to fall into it. That is something that I want to hold somehow in my work, to reflect on the contradicting themes of duality between self and the outside world...
References:
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​https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guston-the-street-p11406
Exhibition visit- Emma McNally: The Earth is Knot Flat @ Drawing Room
13 Dec. 2024
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MA Drawing visited artist Emma McNally's exhibition,The Earth is Knot Flat (2 Oct.- 15 Dec. 2024), at the Drawing Room.
https://drawingroom.org.uk/exhibition/emma-mcnally-the-earth-is-knot-flat/
The word "Knot" in the title initially piqued my curiosity as the word itself was something that I was focusing on in my practice. I liked the use of knot and not, similar-sounding terms with different meanings (homophones), along with a direct statement of the earth being knot/not flat. This made me come into the gallery with a blinding suspicion of what I could expect to feel and see.
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Some brief notes jotted in my notebook while viewing the exhibition:
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Graphite explosion and attentive turbulence...
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grey and black.. lines, dots, shades
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ripped, crumpled, folded, flat..
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suspense
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How do you navigate its complexities through the flashlight?
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The geology of the paper and the drawing accumulated over time.
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Clicking of flashlights..
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circling paper rubbles, I picture a mountain animal walking on top of the fragile landscape of paper.
with a flashlight, an up-close image of one of McNally's drawing on the wall
alongside the Tangle Room, a room open for visitors to experiment with creating marks on paper and different ways of tangling
Overall, I am glad I got to see this exhibition. I think it's prevalent in reflecting on today's living circumstances of the 21st century... a room-filled installation of a particular feeling of being held in suspension and a state of what might be stagnant might shake and fall. Everyone with their flashlights in their hands, clicking on and off between the drawn crevices of terrain-like paper, seemed to act like geographers or investigators navigating this space.
There is something existential that I find myself resonating with McNally's installation and drawings; her questioning approach between geographies and graphite feels temporary, a fugitive matter...
It knots and folds.
The delicate drawings of mapped ellipses, big/small circles, dots, lines, and "scribbles" on the flat/crumpled papers feel precise and playful but only accessible for McNally to decode herself. That is something I wish to feel I could find for myself in my practice and to understand.
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"The Earth is Knot Flat is a provocation to carry the geo in entanglement, in relation and in reaching out to carry and hold something or someone (the knot/ the knit) than in negation (the not that we hear but that slips)."
pg. 4, Graphite Geography by Aya Nassar, a text written to Emma McNally: The Earth is Knot Flat
References:
PDF copy of Graphite Geography by Aya Nassar:
https://drawingroom.org.uk/app/uploads/2024/09/Graphite-Geography-Emma-McNally-copyedited-1.pdf