The narrative tradition in drawing

My personal interest in narrative drawing goes back a long way and it started by 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; Christmas being one of the rare occasions where my dad would being into the house a book that both of us relished. 

Giles

From The Topper

The Topper often had fantastic stories such as the one above, which were exciting and were often events that transformed the everyday into something amazing. I would wonder the streets of Dudley, my home town and imagine what might happen if...

I think that a tradition that relies on the power of drawing to imagine both the everyday and the wondderful is 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 successfully as fine artists 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 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

I'm reminded of Chris Orr because he was brought in to Newport College of Art when I was a student there in the early 1970s. I was at the time studying etching as part of my craft option and his work was a reminder that everyday life could become a subject matter. It felt when I saw his work as if he was trying to hold back time, as conceptual art was the currency of the day, but as the years passed I realised that he was right to stick to his guns and to not worry about the illustartion/fine art divide. You can find here 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. In particular he often uses those pink pages from the Financial Times as surfaces to draw upon, pages that signify the economic reality of global politics, a backdrop in front of which war, famine and climate change occur, and which operates like a green screen when it comes to the reality of human suffering.

Gordon Cheung 

Paul Noble has a long ongoing project in which he depicts 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

Noble's work relies on a shallow, isometric type space within which to operate, which allows for the construction of a wallpaper like effect as his images get larger and larger. Drawing in pencil on this scale feels to be rather awkward, an activity somewhat obsessive and I suspect this is where the drawing's power comes from, an approach to art making that originates in a boy's bedroom, but which has now been given a grand public stage. I don't mean this in a bad way, I'm just trying to feel for the underlying lever that when pulled draws me in and I sense that Noble, like myself, was an obsessive boy, who spent hours looking at the drawings in comics and wondering how they were made so precise, little realising at the time that they were drawn much larger and then reduced in size when printed. 

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

Paula Rego's work has formed a sort of synthesis between fairytale and reality. She has shown how women can be depicted in such a way that their presence demands respect. She gives women weight and by doing that Rego gives us new narratives hidden within old ones. 

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. It is interesting to look at her work in comparison with Raymond Pettibon. 

Raymond Pettibon

Pettibon also uses comic book techniques to question the context within which he finds himself. However he personalises the techniques, making them awkward and difficult by drawing clumsily and finding a more personal relationship with the imagery. His approach has created a personal style out of something that ought to be impersonal and in doing so he manages to give ownership to a way of communication that sits on an edge between pop art and expressionism. 

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. He reminds me of images I first saw of American Socialist art from the 1930s, artists like Ben Shahn and Elizabeth Olds made images that expressed the difficult nature of life under Capitalism, when you were not rich.

Andrew Raftery

In the image above Raftery finds meaning in the idea of the suit. A male orientated construction that allows for certain stances to be taken, ones that highlight the way that the everyday becomes a theatre, one within which we all play out our roles and fit into costumes ready made for them, such as the suit. 

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 

Narrative doesn't always have to be directly figurative, it can be indirect. For instance 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. He also uses drills to draw with. 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

You will often find printmaking an area where illustartion and fine art overlap. For instance Flatbed Press often champion narrative work in print. See here 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

The stories that Goya tells are about today as well as yesterday, some narratives remain pertinent, whilst others fade into obscurity. It is though not our role as artists to worry about that, we should just respond and allow the work to come out as it needs to, it is up to the society that receives it to assess its use value. So don't worry if no one can at the moment can 'see' what it is you are trying to communicate, it may be that in fifty years time the penny drops. 

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

Sam Keogh