Drawing thoughts in Glasgow

I was up in Glasgow this week and there were a few drawing related issues that came up while I was wandering around the shows. There is a very good cross Scotland series of shows on at the moment going under the title, ‘Generation’ 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland. 4 artists are being showcased at GoMA at the moment and they are all very good.  Douglas Gordon, Sara Barker, Moyna Flannigan and Nathan Coley.

Sara Barker has extended the idea of ‘taking a line for a walk’ and has created black sculptural slabs that she has designed as supports for her 3D drawings. Wire is fused to thin painted strips of wood, abstract forms built of soldered wire and gold painted strips that ‘glow’ against the matt black supports. Sometimes the constructions move around an edge and reappear on the other side, again the matt black making the lines appear to float off the surface as shadows cant be seen against it.  What I thought was interesting was the way she starts by building a support. This could be seen as her choice of piece of paper. We are all guilty at certain times of making too easy a starting point. By taking a lot of time and thought in the construction of these supports her final work looks totally ‘meant’, the supports are thick enough to be freestanding, are shaped in response to cutting off the corners of rectangular forms, thus echoing the geometries of line she uses and are finished in such a way that the wire and painted material lines sit just above them. Wire lines can emerge gracefully from holes drilled into the surface, thus the supports being also thought through as bases that can be drilled into to provide holding points for her line thinking. There is also an issue here about planning for exhibitions. By using these supports, she doesn’t have to rely on working over walls or other surfaces presented to her by whichever gallery she happens to be showing in. They are simply shipped and crated as is.

Sara Barker

 Moyna Flannigan is a figurative painter. She creates fictional characters that are designed to reflect on the different ways that we develop personality types. However she also draws a lot and uses drawing to develop her ideas and characters. I noticed she is often using unprimed papers, usually tinted a mid tone to allow her to work with both black and white inks and still evoke a mood by her choice of base colour. The unprimed support makes her inks spread out and bleed, developing a painterly touch easily translated into the thick oils she uses later in the paintings. She is obviously influenced by graphic novel style as well as fashion illustration, and yet she is also looking at German Expressionist drawings, Goya and Rembrandt, her concerns about how to represent the contemporary human condition, being rooted in art history as much as contemporary graphic style. This is a useful lesson, we can use both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, historic and contemporary art as influences on practice, perhaps the most important thing being how well you steal, and not what.

Moyna Flannigan

Nathan Coley’s ‘Lamp of Sacrifice’ is a terrific piece and it demonstrates the power of the model as a message carrier. He has made simple cardboard models of every building used for religious purposes within a particular geographical boundary. These models remind you that all our buildings are in fact 3D rendering of flat drawings. Architects always draw in order to visualize what they are thinking, these drawings are then used by builders to make realities. Coley by drawing flat plans on the cardboard (you can still see the traces of these left on the models) and then folding along the edges or cutting out the shapes, brings the buildings back into the realm of drawing from which they came. They exist again as an idea rather than as a reality. The fact that they represent where a variety of religious faiths are enacted, perhaps further enhancing the fact that these are all more to do with ideas and concepts than realities.

Again a very useful point is made and one that can be used in a variety of ways. A 2D thought can become a 3D reality and a 3D reality can be returned to a 2D thought, in between these is a transitory state, what could be called 2½D, a place of folding and cutting and modeling, an in-between space where thinking can engage with making and drawing at the same time.

Nathan Coley

Douglas Gordon is just really good to look at in depth and the show ‘Pretty much every film and video work from 1992 until now’ allows you to do just that, over 100 TVs were used and this in itself creates an immersive environment that adds another layer to the way you come to ‘see’ his work.

Douglas Gordon