Beyond Apprearances: Diversity of Drawing
Curated by Lauretta Rapley Norma Foulds Simon Plum Larnie Walton With special thanks to Professor Charles Quick
“Good drawing always goes beyond appearances.” Philip Rawson
‘Beyond Appearances’ brings together a variety of artists ranging from the North West, Edinburgh and London, who put great significance on drawing within their practice. Drawing is used by artists to observe, explore, record and respond to the world around them. It helps to create and define an individual visual vocabulary. For many artists drawing is the purest form of expression. This exhibition presents us with an array of languages as used by these artists in their respective practices, providing an insight into the eloquence and value of drawing in art today. The work showcased here demonstrates how technically diverse and interesting drawing can be and celebrates some of the inherent qualities found in good drawing such as intimacy, directness, spontaneity and expressive freedom.
Professor Charles Quick - University of Central Lancashire
Historically drawing can be traced back to the earliest cave paintings which are now found in sites across the world from El Castillo in Cantabria, Spain to Caves in Kakadu Australia. All confirm a collective desire by our ancestors to communicate their world and beliefs pictorially. Artists are still connected to those histories today, but can transcend worlds and cultures without having to acknowledge their boundaries. Drawing is a more universally important foundation of the contemporary world we live in, than we sometimes realise. All the manufactured goods we come into contact with during our daily lives replicates a partner drawing. Our own architectural spaces that ripple out to cover the globe, have been drawn and mapped; and when you flick on a switch or turn on a tap, your connection to the source has been plotted and surveyed. Illustrations, diagrams and cartoons continue to populate and accompany the written word in our books and newspapers and websites.
Drawing can be seen as a common language, one that can be read and interpreted across cultures and peoples, and one, which can even transcend the spoken word. It is against this backdrop of history and function that contemporary artists work. The impetus for artist to draw comes from many places. For some, like our ancestors, it is based on simple observations that reveal what we have always looked at, but have not fully seen or understood. For others it is the first visual expression of an idea, the escaping of their imagination on to the page. Some use it is as way of testing the validity of their visions and developing its possibilities. Painters and sculptors use it as the first engagement with the surfaces that they intend to work on. Artists have always had a relationship with machines through drawing, whether it was the early camera obscurers or the digital technology of the present, where hard drives accentuate the imagination. It is not constricted as a process or means of expression to the 2D, it is acknowledged as being able to articulate space by encompassing all materials, scales and forms. The artists in this exhibition share a common language that goes beyond the spoken word and even the appearance of the artwork. Each not only has a desire to explore what is possible through making lines, marks, patterns and gestures, but a desire to share that with us. As an audience or viewer we can pause for a moment with a work of art, to create our own unique interpretation of it, based on the experiences that we carry with us. This in turn releases the potential for imagined possibilities to spill out of the work, exposing us to new viewpoints and ideas that we hadn’t considered before. Group drawing exhibitions where artists choose to come together to celebrate relationships, practices, and shared spaces, are the foundation of an artists community. It is significant that the artists of Oxheys Mill Studios have taken on this role for Preston.
Untitled 2013, Ink on paper. 50cm x 40cm
NORMA FOULDS
My current work has evolved from exploring the process of drawing. Using materials traditionally associated with drawing; ink and charcoal, I have developed a method of mark making, or drawing which is defined by my own dimensions. How far can I reach, how long am I able to draw for without stopping? Can I draw with both hands or without using sight? These are all processes I have used to form my drawings. The drawings are filled with an air of excitement, a fusion of exploration of my own limits of endurance and the need to make my mark.
Left to right: Tiger, Rabbit, Tiles 2013, All ink on paper.
Simon Plum
Simon Plum is an artist who specialises in painting, drawing and printmaking. Through an on-going series of narrative-based artworks, personal fables are explored by the artist, with a mixture of quirky perspectives, sardonic humour, and an uncertain grasp on reality. He puts great significance on drawing, which he feels underpins his art practice. These can vary from surreal and instinctive sketches in ink to meticulously drawn large-scale landscapes, populated by animals and people. www.simonplum.com
Untitled 2013, Ink and coloured pencil on paper.
LAURETTA RAPLEY Lauretta’s practice involves the application of several mediums including, pencil, ink, acrylic and the use of found and collected fabrics. The process of drawing and the ritual of sewing with the recent introduction of weaving have become integral to her process of creation. Lauretta finds herself immersed in the vigour of memory and attachment, where the emotions and feelings associated with personal experience often serve as the initial motivation, yet the driving force behind her work is created by a developmental progression of drawing, writing, painting, collage and sewing. This allows her work to organically evolve and grow with no preconception of a finished idea. Working this way compliments the central themes explored throughout her practice such as memory, nostalgia, family, attachment and loss. Balance and objectivity is required to establish harmony, but uncertainty and a deliberate lack of planning pose frustrating challenges and often result in mistakes that are difficult to rectify and embrace. The work shown in Beyond Appearances grew out of experimental sketches and drawings that were inspired by photographs and transformed into 3d forms, where bygone lives and disconnected memories, relationships and dreams are juxtaposed in fragmented compositions. www.laurettarapley.com
Untitled 2012-13, Oil and pencil on board. 75 x 90cm
LARNIE WALTON
A quest for slowness seems almost impossible in the company of an overactive society. My works aim to offer a space for quiet contemplation. To help aid my ideas my drawings and paintings reference elements of representation whilst they engage in a minimalist aesthetic with emphasis on a simplistic nature. Its intimacy and laborious process helps create a sense of timelessness with the hope of asking us to slow down. larniewalton.wordpress.com
Bees’ Demise 2013, Graphite on paper. A2
andrea beveridge
My name is Andrea Beveridge and I am an artist currently based in Edinburgh. My work predominantly circulates around the discussion of humanities relationship with animals and nature: the similarities, differences and interactions. I am interested in studying the current debates surrounding our relationship with the natural world, with the view to explore sociological and ethical concerns in a larger context and translate these through my work utilising visual narrative as a language to connect and communicate with the viewer. In my work the link to the natural world can be direct or indirect, and more often than not develops into a surreal abstraction of the original subject matter. These visuals are most commonly created through intricate drawings, both large-scale and small.
Untitled.
JULIE SAUL
Julie Saul is a resident artist at Oxheys Mill Studios. She studied an MA in Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking at UCLan.
Untitled. 2013, Pencil on paper. 50cm x 40cm
ISOBEL PEACHEY Isobel Peachey was born in 1978 in Burnley and grew up in the Ribble Valley before moving to London where she studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art. Isobel’s work has been exhibited in London and across the UK and her works feature in international private collections. She was selected for the BP Portrait Award 2009 and 2011 exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in London and also for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ annual exhibition 2009 at the Mall Galleries, London. In 2009, she won the BP Travel Award to study two historical re-enactment events in Switzerland and Belgium and her research resulted in an exhibition of portraits which went on display at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010. That same year she was commissioned by Cunard to paint a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen for their new liner, the Queen Elizabeth. She has recently been commissioned to paint portraits for St Paul’s Cathedral and The Royal Society of Arts. When working on a portrait, my aim is to capture as true a likeness as possible but I also hope to convey aspects of my sitter that create an emotional and human connection between the portrait and the viewer. It is often in the act of looking, detecting the subtle changes of the sitter’s gaze and body language that these aspects can be found. Drawing enables me to use the simplest and most direct form of mark-making to study these observations; using line and tone to practise, mould and refine. By stripping down, extracting and building up layers of visual information, I gather together the elements I need to portray the physical form of my sitter and hopefully a sense of their presence too.
Head D.F. conte crayon on paper, 2008.
stephen siwiak `Image – making begins with interrogating appearances and making marks…. …..to draw is not only to measure and put down, it is also to receive. When the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing’ John Berger. Berger on Drawing.2007 p.7
`…darkness attracted him as much as light…the darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we carry within us..………. and to avoid looking at him, she too closed her eyes. But for her, darkness did not mean infinity; for her, it meant a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see’ Milan Kundera. `The Unbearable Lightness of Being’1984 p.91
`I don’t think the painter need see or know his sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s `soul, essence or character.’ Gerhard Richter.Portraits.sleeve notes.2007.
`….drawing as being between the conscious and the unconscious, between the intuitive and the intentional, as floating between control and uncontrollable’ Vong Phaophanit.The Centre for Drawing: The First Year. Wimbledon School of Art.2001.
Untitled. Pencil on paper.
alexander appleby
‘The Haunted Fishtank’ (fox) , Ink on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm
nina ogden
Nina's work examines our relationship with animals, how we co-exist with them and they with us. Her practice looks at how animals in pre-Twentieth Century art were pictured symbolically, allegorically or as a sentimental or taxonomical record. Nina is investigating how the animals' position in Contemporary art is undone, re-focusing on the perspective of the animal and man's ecological relationship to the animal.
Untitled, pencil on postcard, 2013
steph fletcher
'The anarchists are not promising anything to anyone. They only want people to be conscious of their own situations and seize freedom for themselves'
4 and 20, 2013. Pencil on paper.
sarah jane bellwood
My world is primarily visual, and my work is myself making sense of my surroundings. I explore my environment through drawing. Drawing for me is an obsession and feeds my practice as a painter, it is the first point of research and needs to be meticulous before I can proceed with what are often more abstract works in paint.
Cloud Inversion, French Pyrennees. Pencil on paper.
ceris jones
My particular interest lies with the figure in action, and is mainly cave related. The drawings of cavers are produced in situ using charcoal or pencil. Â The pressure of capturing the activities as they happen echos the tension of the activities themselves and I hope this immediacy is captured in the drawings. I regularly work with the life model, a practice which I consider to be vital to the understanding of the human form. Although the figure still dominates I have recently found myself responding to the wider environment, producing a series of landscapes of the areas where the caving takes place. Â In contrast to most of the figure work these landscapes are constructed in the studio, from drawings and reproductions of drawings from my sketchbooks. www.cerisjones.co.uk
Untitled 2013
matt kay
Matt Kay is a commercial illustrator and art director with an international portfolio of well known brands including Relentless, Coke and Glennfiddich. He is also an exhibiting artist, collaborating with others to push the boundaries of art and technology. His latest project with RCA artist Natalie Turner is currently exhibiting in Milan, Miami and London. Matt’s most recent independent project, using iPhones and iPads as sketching tools, allows him to explore the relationship between drawing and technology. Working in very small scale amplifies his painterly mark, a trade mark of Matt’s long-standing acrylic style. An essential element of the works in this project is the conscious use of touch-screen, as opposed to pencil - thereby replacing old with new, accessible, everyday, taken-for-granted technology.
Potato Processing Plant, pencil on paper, 841 x 594mm
elly cottrill
I am interested in craft and draughtsmanship and believe in treasuring the value and dignity of the human labour that plays such an important role in our everyday lives. My drawings are sensitive observations of places that interest me. I like to draw attention to places such as factories and manufacturing plants that do not fit into a traditional category of beauty. I wish to make drawings that attract attention to the realities of modern day.
Stanhope Street (off Brook Street) Preston PR17PN
oxheysmillstudios.com