The Trinity Buoy Wharf drawing prize is on tour again, and interestingly as it does so, first year fine art students at the University of the Arts Leeds begin their first module with a drawing brief. Even in this time of media soaked information and constant Zoom meetings, drawing can still hold its own, and the fact that it can be done with very low and cheap forms of technology, ensures that it continues to be relevant. This year in particular the short listed artists demonstrate the continuing power of visual observation and how drawing can operate as a focus and a selector, picking out from the chaos of reality those moments that ensure that art can still reflect thoughtfully on the human condition. As well as all those other subjects and approaches, such as landscapes, buildings, abstracts, three dimensional drawings, performance drawing and gestural mark making, this year a strand of portrait drawing has emerged as one of the show's most powerful aspects, and its worth a closer look.
Akash Bhatt
Akash Bhatt has interwoven text and image in his portrait, something that many of us aspire to do but rarely with the sensitivity that Bhatt demonstrates. All human beings have personal narratives and sometimes we can see these in their faces or in the way they sit, stand or move, and at other times it is in the stories they tell or the ones told about them by others. In this case tiny forehead worry lines, echo the horizontal lines of a sailor striped top, whilst foregrounded are hands used to hard work, all integrated and set into a field of reflective text. He has obviously honed his observational skills through the constant use of sketchbooks, something I've always warmed to as a way of keeping your eyes tuned to the many and various forms that make up our world. You can see him at work in this video.
Akash Bhatt
Anna Barratt
Barratt's work springs from unconscious tensions that come from the fact that the everyday is weird. Well sometimes it is and then its not, the toilet is boring, its function to support an everyday need, but our thoughts about this are often twisted and strange, such as why is that towel hung in that way and why is it so close to the cistern and who left that stain?
Helena McGrath
Helena McGrath has an ideal technique for the locked in portrait. Her washes suggestive of a time marked out with the filling in of liquid tones, drips forming cage verticals that trap the image as it arrives. The figure in the background, (could it be the artist?) presenting to us the subject of the drawing, the home becomes the stage, which becomes the world within which the artist makes. This is a sort of self portrait as world maker, but the world is a domestic one, and who is to say that it is a smaller world than any of the others that we think exist?
James Robert Morrison
James Robert Morrison
James Robert Morrison has pushed the fag joke to its limits. Rolling papers are waver thin, almost like Bible paper, with that tasty strip of glue, waiting to be licked and stuck to the other unglued paper edge. These are close ups, or as he puts it, 'there is never more than a fag paper between them', or in this case it takes about 60 fag papers to support this figure/ground relationship, all neatly stuck, licked dirty into the slick of graphite, touched carefully onto the surface of a Rizla dream.
Lucy Anderson
Lucy Anderson makes large scale charcoal drawings. It's the light and surprising shadows that tell these stories, perhaps even more than what we think we see. Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is; a grey ghost shadow floats across the back wall, emerging from the old woman's head, perhaps an intimation of what's to come, whilst a strong young hand commands the foreground, alongside a half full glass of water. A question has been asked, of both the old woman and ourselves, but who will answer it?
Nancy Haslam
Nancy Haslam
Nancy Haslam gives us an insight into interwoven lives, lives of harsh reality, the ones that you know about, that you see statistics about, but don't really want to know about. Her line meanders, her touch is one of knowing unknowing, as she opens windows but in some ways closes them at the same time. There is no perspective, well not one we understand as such, this isn't one point or two point or three point, it's all points North, its being stuck in one place, one that you cant get far away enough from to see it in perspective.
Sally Wood
Sally Wood
Sally Wood
Sally Wood shows us a new generation emerging. These are the portraits of those who will inhabit our future, as yet unframed, their futures still emerging, not yet boxed in by convention and society's will to power. Fresh, open and direct, these portraits are a healthy reminder of a future time when the virus is gone and we return to being able to see each other in the flesh and meet ourselves on our own terms and not those imposed upon us by a government that has forgotten what people look like.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2020 exhibition will tour to the following venues:
- Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge, Wiltshire: 2 to 31 October 2020
- Cooper Gallery at the University of Dundee: 13 November to 19 December 2020
- Trinity Buoy Wharf in London: from 9 January to 22 January 2021
- The Gallery at Arts University Bournemouth: from February 2021
See also:
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