Andrew Lister: Drawing Exhibition

For the next couple of weeks there is a show in the college gallery of drawings by Andrew Lister. They appear so unassuming and quiet, that many of the issues they raise might be overlooked. Therefore, especially as Andrew and myself will be in conversation in the gallery on Wed 21st May at 2pm, I thought it useful to put forward a few points that could perhaps be opened out during the actual discussion.

Looking at Lister’s drawings: the frozen moment of the stare.

Pale, sometimes hardly there, pencil drawings on white papers float on white walls in white frames. These seemingly cool drawings are subtle doorways into a world of hot intense emotional wrestling with perception, but they can take a while to warm to, time is needed to unpick their engagement with the world of perceptual struggle.

The rules of engagement are chosen deliberately. Paper size, easel, board, drawing equipment, all determined by the fact that everything has to be carried onto a number 36 bus, Lister’s preferred transport out into his landscape of choice. The place itself, quiet, removed from the bustle of the city, a place of immersion, of solitude and with the frayed edges of rawness and control that most of our English landscape possesses after thousands of years of human interference. No actual ‘raw nature’ left in England, simply the constant growing through of plant-life, as it seeks to recover the ground it is always contesting with humans, some pockets of resistance being more established than others.

In the middle of this chosen landscape stands Lister, he has been walking or perhaps ‘stalking’ through it, now after selecting a viewpoint, attempting to erect an easel on uneven ground, trying to make its stance sturdy enough to carry the weight of his marks, getting his board and paper at an angle and height that will allow him to work; eye/hand co-ordination bring vital to what will take place.

At some point he will start to draw, the light of a particular morning or afternoon will hurt his eyes if he gazes for too long at the paper, but even so he will have to look at this paper for some time. It’s shape and position will talk to him, they are geometrical intruders into the curved space of nature and he will have to battle with this fact. He looks, he sees the leaves massed along a tree’s outstretched branches, he looks, he sees a space beneath a branch, he looks, he sees the solid mass of a tree trunk, he looks again and sees the passage of one moment of looking into another.

He starts to draw with a pencil; HB, not hard, not soft, undemonstrative in its nature, therefore more suitable as a recording device, as a seismic responder to the hand’s movements. He checks his position. He feels for the pencil, focuses on how he stands in relation to the paper and the first drawn marks, how does his body articulate in relation to these first marks, how does this relate to what has just been seen? His eyes flit over a bunch of leaves, they rustle in a soft breeze, light glints off leaf surfaces as they roll and tilt, a movement is set up between how the leaves move and how the eyes move over the leaf mass. The hand goes back to its job of recording, a few more marks are made. Once there these marks establish the drawings initial identity. It is about something as soon as it starts. But what? This might depend on circumstances. Look at these drawings and some interactions are easy to spot, a bird sits in a tree above the drawing and defecates, its droppings spatter the paper. Immediately the viewer is reminded of the reality of the paper surface, the marks just an illusion. The drawer also responds to this sudden intrusion of reality. Marks become more about surface and less about spatial illusion.  At other times a few marks set up a cross surface rhythm, they need stabilising and in order to do this more attention to verticals and their relationship with mass awareness develops.

Take time to look at these drawings and they will unpick themselves. Look for how erasure is used. Marks put in, marks taken out, marks put in, marks taken out again. What is it about this process? Look again at how this works. Some drawings are almost screaming out with emotional frustration, they cry, “No! No! No! It’s not like that.” As sets of marks begin to build a story, sometimes that story is clear, but often it’s not. The brave artist keeps beginning the story again, the story of the looking being hard fought, and often is only recognised once the struggle is over. Some of these drawings will have been taken home and left for a while before being picked back up and reappraised for what they actually communicate.

Look at the erasures again and you will see that they are of different sorts. Some simply remove, but others adjust. Some cut into the edges of a series of pencil  lines, subtly altering their spatial position. A line rubbed out from the left now sitting much more clearly into the space to its right, a bunch of marks once hovering around an open space beneath, now oscillating slightly forward and backwards, into and out of the picture plane, as marks alternate between varying degrees of darkness and lightness.

As Lister builds these drawings he opens out new problems for himself. Look around the room and you will see several drawings ‘hanging’ from the top edge of the paper. He is forced to build our spatial awareness from the top rather than the traditionally more straightforward receding floor plane. What so many image makers do when faced with the sort of perceptual struggle Lister is engaged with is to use an awareness of perspective and the horizon line to place spatial indicators into the image. These usually start from the bottom edge and are stepped back into the picture plane, using a receding perspective rhythm. If the artist is clever he or she will hide this rhythm by inventive placement, perhaps several clumps of grass are indicated, then a few tree boles and a broken fence. Lister simply doesn’t look down, he stares straight ahead and uses no visual props or clichés, simply asking us to re-enter the perceptual struggle on his behalf.

Sometimes spaces may 'pop', what was at one time the mass, becoming the space and vice versa. This is a product of his way of working, never prioritising the world of things over the world of spaces. At other times you become aware of the paper, some white papers are cooler in temperature than others and as they are grouped together in an exhibition, all these slight differences take on meanings. You begin to look at the paper edges and realise that they are carefully torn into shape, not cut. This together with the awareness of slight colour difference reinforces our awareness of the object-ness of the paper and breaks our suspension of disbelief, making a mockery of Lister's attempts to re-create space on a flat surface. 

We are asked some old questions. What is it to see? What is it to capture the traces of looking? How do you cope with the ‘madness’ of the stupidity of trying to make an object of a process? How can the rubbing of a graphite point against the rough surface of a white paper attempt to capture any of this process?

One answer to these questions is that there is a close connection between the eyes and the hands. A pencil is a tool that can leave traces of its passing, which is itself a record of the hand’s passage; its point leaving a thin line focusing all attention on one graphic element, one that can be read as a sign as well as a trace.

The hand is directed by the brain, he brain interprets the “petit sensations” it is receiving via the eyes, and as it does the game begins; a game of interpretation, deduction and induction. A drawing may start with a quite logical premise, if I make marks like this, I will be able to record the space I am looking at, or the rhythm set up by the leaf patterns. However what begins as a type of deductive logic can often change as a drawing progresses; specific observations can suggest patterns or ideas about what is going on. It is as if you are developing a theory about the drawing and what it is now doing, this itself may then lead to new interpretations as to its meaning. However then it can get all too predictable and the artist stops looking and has to reassert the perceptual engagement by going back to square one.

So what are the differences between signs and traces? Traces come before signs. The hand traces the flicker of looking, the brain then recognises this trace and interprets it as a space maker or as an image finder, whatever seems useful to it at the time. In this case these traces are like frozen heartbeats. They carry the energy of compressed anger, the frustration of the gap, the schism between the moment of looking and it’s understanding. How can the sensation of the now be captured? At what moment do perceptions turn into thought? These drawings are reflections on phenomenology, debates on the nature of reality and arguments set out around the process of awareness. They are stripped down images, naked, without the clothing of technological mediation. In this way 'traces' of the hand's passage, become 'signs' of perceptual cognition. 

Richard Hamilton Transition IIII 1954

Not long ago I was looking at some early images of Richard Hamilton. An artist thought of as belonging to the ‘Pop Art’ pantheon, not one who is associated with this type of perceptual reflection. However if you look at Hamilton’s painting ‘Transition IIII’ from 1954 it is easy to detect the powerful influence of Cezanne on his early career. Hamilton was looking out of a train window and trying to make an image that reflected the experience. The first person he turns to as someone who could provide an insight as to how to do this is of course Cezanne. Hamilton, together with others such as Victor Pasmore and Harry Thubron in Leeds had put together the foundation structures of art education in England and at the core of these structures were strategies designed to ensure that students engaged in unpremeditated looking. They wanted to strip away all the ‘training’, stop all the resorting to tricks and easy answers when engaging with visual responses to the world and the person they looked back to as a role model for this was one of the foundation stones of Modernism, Paul Cezanne. Lister did his Pre-Diploma year at Leeds during the late 1960s. It was a time when the staff teaching had all recently been working with Thubron and they still upheld the values and philosophies that he had installed. In fact, because the Leeds/Newcastle experiment became the model for all Pre-Diploma courses across the country, including the one I went to in Wolverhampton, no student who was serious about his or her art education could afford to ignore the lessons of Cezanne.  Whatever you did, whether it was painting or sculpture, would be tested against the long, often solitary engagement of struggling to find a visual language to cope with responses to nature. Pop Art may have opened our eyes to a much wider definition of what nature could be, but even so the model of a long protracted totally dedicated engagement was still there. I can still remember a tutor at the time telling me that what I was doing was all right, but it would not be until I had spent at least another 30 years of struggle and making, that anyone would begin to take me seriously, because it would only be after that time that the refinement of a new language could actually be put to the test, only then that an audience would be able to assess whether or not a lifetime’s investigations had born fruit or not.  We were little aware at the time that the 1960s were also a time of huge cultural change and that Post-Modernism was going to sweep away all of our cultural sounding posts.

Paul Cezanne Drawing of a tree 1895/1900

The time distance between Cezanne's drawing of a tree and Hamilton's painting of a view from a moving train is about 55 years and it is now 65 years since Hamilton's work was made. 

We now live in a time very distant to the one both Andrew and myself grew up in, but the experiences of youth stay with you and even if those experiences no longer chime with a younger generation, they still remain valid. One of the reasons I’m writing this post is that for art students studying now it is hard to realise how much things have changed over the 40 years that I have been teaching at the college.  Ideas are passed on like relay batons and as they pass on they change and are handled differently by each person. The idea of confronting perception and its affect on us will run and run, but it is not as central to the production of art images today as it was. The world changes and each generation’s environment is different, but each generation will have to come to terms with their experiences and some within each generation will want to reflect on what it is to have those experiences, hopefully these drawings by Andrew Lister will be a reminder of the excitement of raw looking and its translation into an image. 

Looking and drawing, drawing and looking, it doesn't get better than this.

A text that might help open out thoughts about the central role of perception in drawing is:
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1961) ‘Eye and Mind’, Edie, J., ed. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Northwestern University Press, Chicago.

Download this: Cezanne's Doubt