Drawing : Mark-making: Perspectives on Drawing at GoMA

Jonathan Owen

I was in Glasgow last weekend and decided to go and see the exhibition ‘Mark-making’: Perspectives on Drawing at GoMA. If you are in Glasgow it is on until the 20^th of October 2019.

This is a quite small exhibition and it showcases the work of six young contemporary artists - Erica Eyres, Lois Green, Ross Hamilton Frew, Jonathan Owen, Gregor Wright and France-Lise McGurn.

The exhibition curator has organised the work into three pairings, the work being in 3 small spaces that you walk through one after the other. The first pair is of Erica Eyres and Jonathan Owen. I presume they were put together because of their very different responses to photographic imagery. I was particularly interested in Owen’s response to images taken from film stills. As a sculptor he is interested in the possibility of new images arising by the processes of reducing and removing, his Eraser Drawings, made using found book pages, have therefore been described as carvings in two dimensions. Often drawing from cinema history he carefully removes ink from the surface of the page in order to erase the main characters or film stars, reshaping them into new aspects of the scenes they were initially part of. You could argue that this would be much easier to do in Photoshop, but by doing this by hand, he re-introduces the haptic into the photographic world. This is again something I have posted about before, but his approach is I think unique and well worth looking at in more detail. The ‘ghosts’ of figures left over from the process, remind me of ‘spirit photographs’, which were 19^th century attempts to capture images of ghosts and other spiritual entities. At the time double exposures were not really understood and were often produced by accident in the darkroom and therefore they gave rise to a myth about photography’s ability to capture ghosts. If you want to try Owen's process print your photographs onto sturdy paper using an inkjet printer and then use an electric eraser to work into the print.

Jonathan Owen

The drawings of Erica Eyres are based on images from 1970’s men’s magazines. These drawings have been stripped down to their ‘bare’ essence. The drawing of ‘Mike’, who came from a magazine section called “One for the Ladies” reclines, floppy genitals and all in a pre-selfie time, whereby only the cameraman knew what you were going to look like in print. Some of the images come from a nudist magazine, including one of middle aged nudes bowling. “They have a distinct awkwardness,” Erica states, “but simultaneously lack the self-conscious, staged quality of the modern selfie.” These ‘stripped down’ drawings have been built up from a minimum of lines, they float in a sea of virgin white; their innocence a strange one as it emerges out of a context of soft porn but also a context of pre-mobile photographic naivety. The drawings feel as if they are slightly distorted, something is not quite right about proportions, perhaps as details from the images were eliminated, the normal reference points disappeared and therefore measurement went slightly off. Whatever it is that has re-shaped these images, the translation of the photographs into drawings is interesting because as always in a translation the translator’s personal interests shape the final form.

Erica Eyres 'Mike'

As I move on through into the next room another set of photographically influenced images, Lois Green’s small monochrome paintings of domestic scenes, line one wall. I was particularly taken with a tiny painting of a clothes horse that could have been painted at any point in the last 50 years. Its tonal range was probably one that a camera would have found very difficult to capture, and above all the surface quality was very seductive, so seductive in fact that I was suffused with a warm almost 1950s glow of familiarity. Green states that ‘her studio practice is currently focused on creating small-scale tonal paintings and drawings from found imagery, photographs and film stills. They are produced by continuously removing and applying (usually) oil or charcoal on a variety of glossed surfaces to describe subtitles and drama in light and tone revealing emotional weight within an image'.

Lois Green

Green goes on to state, 'My work depicts intimate spaces - often domestic settings and the progression of my work is generating more interest in the ambiguities of tone which can bring uncertainty to the reading of an image and question scenes that appear very familiar.’ Her approach is very straightforward and I found very refreshing because of that. Green’s small paintings were presented as drawings, an interesting conundrum that asks questions about where the boundaries are between the two disciplines.

Lois Green

On the opposite wall are the drawings of France-Lise McGurn who often works with painting and drawing to make images that traverse gallery walls, floors and ceilings. She draws on a collected archive of found imagery to create figurative installations which reference notions of sexuality, ecstasy, loss and consciousness. McGurn uses swift brushstrokes, spontaneous lines and repeated marks to create images that feel effortless and have a historical precedent in the work of Henri Matisse. In this small exhibition of drawings, perhaps the most interesting issue was how by clustering groups of framed drawings together she could suggest that her work was often architecturally focused and designed to evoke mood rather than to analyse culture.

France-Lise McGurn

Ross Hamilton Frew and Gregor Wright were the pair exhibiting in the final room. A room that was kept in low lighting conditions so that Gregor Wright’s computer generated colour drawings could be seen in appropriate lighting conditions. These digital drawings are built up of many layers of different types of digital mark making and a wide palette of colours and suggest that they are in many ways a replacement for painting. Again a question is asked about boundaries between painting and drawing, in this case is it still drawing because it is done on a computer, even though these images are about colour and visual texture? Gregor’s images are suggestive of everything from science fiction landscapes to club interiors and his more conventional uses of drawing materials suggest biomorphic approaches to form making reminiscent of Arshile Gorky.

Gregor Wright

Ross Hamilton Frew’s small images were delicate abstractions of line and repeated structures, sometimes opening out into implied variations, all held within a very understated rectilinear format. He seemed to be working with traces of previous printed ephemera, but in the time I was there I found it hard to make the connections I think I was supposed to be making.