doob doob o'rama

A shimmering breeze permeated fabrica today in the form of Frankie Cluny dancing Bollywood in full sparkling finery. Life drawing was warmed by rich Indian colours of pthalo green and crimson shot through with gold thread as the participants drew in pastel, charcoal and ink.
While the high notes of Lata Mangeshkar echoed in the freezing church the frenetic drawing kept everyone warm or at least unconcerned about the snow outside.

To Draw

"To 'draw' implies everything the word stands for:
to pull or to drag or to draw forth, as from the earth, a vein, or well."
Lance Esplund

Life drawing at Fabrica - tangents of the day

Jenny Saville in Oxford
Sfumato
Kenneth Armitage
Conrad Marca-Relli at Ronchini Gallery

A typically interesting range of responses to drawing today, things people have been looking at, thinking about and trying out.
Go on look them up.

Life drawing dates for November are 6th, 13th, 20th. Bookings in advance through me at jane.fordham@fabrica.org.uk

Artist William Kentridge on charcoal drawing from The Guardian

South Africa's most celebrated contemporary artist describes the allure of working with the messy immediacy of charcoal.

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• Interview by Dale Berning
• The Guardian, Saturday 19 September 2009

When I went to art school, the idea was that if you were going to be an artist, you had to paint with oil paints on canvas. I discovered I was very bad at that, so it was an enormous relief to discover that there already existed a strong tradition of drawing as a primary medium of art-making.

A lot of artists in South Africa did drawing because it was cheap. You could find a scrap of paper and a ball-point pen or a piece of charcoal and you could be an artist. You didn't need an easel and stretchers and canvas and turpentine and expensive oil paint.

For me, it was also very important that drawing was a monochromatic medium - that colour was not an essential part of it. When I worked with colour, I was always stuck with the question, "does this look nice?", and that's a terrible basis on which to be an artist. Since then, I've learned to paint, and in fact I could be quite a good Sunday painter. But it's not a medium in which I think, and the vital thing about drawing for me is that it is a medium in which one can think.

Drawing is a non-verbal thinking process. One of the things about charcoal drawing is that it is instantly alterable - you can change it as quickly as you can think. One wipe of a cloth and the image disappears or is smudged and you can rethink it. The flexibility of drawing is important. There's an immediacy of drawing, of thinking in drawing, which is vital for me.

During my studies, I was looking at a lot of the German expressionists and at early Russian films. I was looking at those branches of modernism that didn't leave figuration. For me, abstraction was like colour: when I tried to work in complete abstraction, I had no idea what I was doing, why I should make one mark and not another. Now, in fact, a number of my drawings end up as non-recognisable smudges on paper - but they've had a route to get there that started with a connection to a representation of the external world.

I produce many different kinds of drawings. Some are just drawings. Others are done in the service of something else, to be animated, used for a film, opera or a piece of theatre, where the demands of the nature of the transformation might be given by the libretto or by the music.

I work closely with different kinds of references. I have a collection of images and things to which I refer throughout my working process. I find my visual imagination is always less interesting than those things I've discovered in looking at the specifics of details. If one can hold on to the specific, it almost always is more interesting.

Take the drawing of an old typewriter, for example. One has a universal image of what an old typewriter looks like in one's head, so there is an image of it, but it will be bland and inaccurate. There are details of the different kinds of carriage returns, or different kinds of moulding of the black surface of the typewriter around the space bar, which are always more interesting than I could imagine.

The specifics of a particular image or context, even if people don't know that context, somehow give an authority to the rendering of it, whether it's in a text or an artwork. One doesn't have to have been in Dublin to be able to form a picture of Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses. When reading the book, you may form a false image of Dublin - very different to what someone who lives in Dublin might think of the city - but the specifics of the local references are somehow the clues that one needs to build this city.

For me, the drawing is the process of arriving at this image. This process is usually very fast to begin with. I work with charcoal and charcoal dust, and within the first minute, the large expanse of white paper can be turned into a dirty grey. I'll put lines across it, finding vague geographies of where things will go, and then the process of drawing is the remaining hours or days it takes to work through the drawing. The art is to try to finish at the same speed you begin with - to not let the drawing become more and more cramped, to try to keep a looseness and an open-endedness right to the end.

Often, the finished drawing is different from what I had in my head when I started off, and the better ones are those that don't look anything like I thought they would. The ideas are not the driving force in drawing, nor is meaning. The need to make an image is the driving force. It isn't like a writer who has a story they have to tell, and so they write a novel. It isn't as if I have an image the world has to see. Rather I have a need to be making marks on paper. Drawing isn't a decision, it is a need.

Cluster tea party

I invited a group from the Somerset Day Centre to come and see the summer exhibition today as part of a project we are planning with them. As it was our first proper gathering I bought lots of cake and took in table cloths and nice china for a tea party. With the help of volunteers Abby and Ken we laid out an inviting spread which they thoroughly appreciated.
It was a lovely sunny day and the big bonus was that the artist who made Cluster, Annemarie O'Sullivan, was delivering a family drop-in workshop. So we sat talking about the exhibition drinking tea, getting to know each other while watching people make extraordinary structures with sticks and potatoes. A surreal and enjoyable afternoon for us all.
The next phase will be for us to go to their centre and run a series of short workshops based on the exhibition.

linear

landscape, body, map or crack in the flag stone?
A really interesting series of drawings was begun today in life drawing by Jenny who had the presence of mind to seize what was exciting and useful in the moment even though it meant she spent most of the session with her back to the model.
Each drawing is the same but simultaneously completely different, each evokes a different idea some really are maps, some are bodies, some embraces, and some landscapes, it's the beginning of a potentially very rich set of work.

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Picnics

I must remember to collect some tea towels or pillow cases to give out as personal drawing picnic surfaces for everyone. Jenny came up with the idea, every week I see her things laid out and it all looks so enticing, a world on a cloth, the only world that matters for the next three hours.

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