The narrative tradition in drawing

My own personal interest in narrative drawing goes back a long way and it started by me being obsessed by Giles cartoons and comics such as the Topper when I was a boy. Giles in particular fascinated me because I could recognise aspects of my life in his drawings. His sheds were like my dad’s shed and his houses were ones I recognised as being like ones I had been in. He drew trees in a way I wanted to and he constructed fantastic snow scenes for the daily express Christmas annual edition of his cartoons.

Giles

From The Topper

Gradually I grew to think that this tradition was more powerful than the accepted story of British art that foregrounds Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds rather than Hogarth and Rowlandson.

I’m not going to go into detail about this ‘yet’ but I thought it might be of interest to highlight a few other artists that I see as continuing to work within a narrative tradition.

Adam Dant uses brush with pen and ink to make elaborate drawings that he does a great deal of background research for. Even though they are based in fact he quickly undermines the realism by building into his images a dysfunctional logic. He is interested in what could be called psycho-histories of places. His work reflects on subjects such as ideology, politics and British culture. 

Adam Dant

Try this video it gives you a better idea of how he exhibits the work. 

Chris Orr has a fascination with the physical and social nature of the modern city and is a really good printmaker. He spends lots of time drawing in the city and then puts these drawings into his reflections on contemporary life. 

Chris Orr

A Video of Chris Orr talking about his work.

Gordon Cheung is an artist that reflects on a life caught between the hyper-realism of Baudrillard and a life led as street-cred cool guy. His collages give us a sense of cheap materialism. The global village as political utopia, Globalisation and the crumbling of inner cities all combine within his work which uses graffiti based techniques, alongside traditional collage and lies between drawing and painting as a discipline.

Gordon Cheung 

Paul Noble has a long ongoing project to depict Nobson Newtown, a fictitious town that he uses as a vehicle for his ideas. These vast drawings are painstakingly done in pencil. He has more recently also been making scenes from his drawings in ceramics.  

Paul Noble

One of the most interesting aspects of narrative art is that it is something that occurs within many different traditions and in a transglobal world you can find many hybrids whereby different traditions merge, sometimes with local influences dominating and at other times the 'outsider' influence overpowers the local. For instance in the work of the Pakistan woman artist Heraa Khan, it is clear that she still uses Mughal traditions but has reinvented them for contemporary purposes. The lives of modern Pakistani women being trapped between older traditional concepts and the modern idea of what it is to be a contemporary woman consumer.

Heraa Khan

Maria Khan

Maria Khan is another artist from Pakistan who peoples her drawings with female characters that are acting out a variety of roles designed to question the traditional roles women are supposed to have in a traditional society. You could compare her work with Paula Rego's.

Paula Rego

Shehzil Malik

Shehzil Malik, also from Pakistan is using narrative drawing that uses comic book techniques to question the political context within which she finds herself. In her case the western style of comic book drawing has completely replaced local traditions but on a second glance it is easy to see how in fact both traditional Mughal painting and comic book image making have roots in how to tell a wordless narrative on paper and it is interesting to look at her work in comparison with Raymond Pettibon. 

Raymond Pettibon

Andrew Raftery draws contemporary scenes of American life. His complex images are at first sight just ordinary slices of life but on second sight become slightly uneasy and awkward images of contemporary angst.

Andrew Raftery

Charles Avery has developed his own imaginative country and as he has extended his ideas about what goes on in it his drawings and objects have combined to create a complex world that seems to flit in and out of touch with the one we inhabit in the everyday.

Charles Avery 

Miguel A. Aragón makes laser-cut burnt residue embossed prints based on newspaper photographs of murders. By using the burned lines of the laser to mark-make he plays with the idea that traumatic events are burned into our consciousness, by drilling his portraits he suggests the underlying violence of contemporary Mexico. What I find particularly interesting about his work is that it bridges the gap between material and illustrative narratives, his working methods being linked directly to narrative intent.

Aragón

Aragón drilled portrait

Flatbed Press often champion narrative work in print click

There are a lot of people out there dealing with visual narrative and there is much cross-over with illustration. This is I think healthy, the frayed edges between disciplines often being where innovation happens. There is much crossover between directly political art and narrative drawing because of drawing's ability to create an immediate response to a situation. This means that many narrative drawings are also contested records of events, subjective accounts of things that were important and often traumatic events in the lives of people that have lived through violent change. 

Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby's coloured crayon drawing above is a response to an incident in Palestine many years ago, its energy and subject matter reminding us that certain issues occur over and over again, the faceless character of the oppressor and their weapons being something that we have seen before.

Goya

See also:

Gordon Cheung 
Large scale narrative images
Drawing and politics
How technical drawing spaces can be used in narrative image making
Philip Guston
Printmaking
The continuing influence of Surrealism on visual narrative
Chad McCail