Drawing and the City

Ahmet Doğu İpek’s intense drawings have very strong ties with the city of Istanbul where he works.  These large scale drawings are made with graphite and watercolour and reflect what it can feel like when living in a city that is constantly being built around you. The last time I was in Istanbul parts of the city really felt like this. You could move from the deep gloomy dark magic of the Basilica Cistern and come out into the light of day only to be surrounded by the noise of constant building, building that never seemed to finish, lots of new buildings appearing to be left half finished as new ones began to be constructed in their footprint. 

This is one of the columns that you can see in the cisterns below Istanbul. If you look at the ceiling structure you can see how it might have influenced Ipek's drawings.

Ahmet Doğu İpek

Ahmet Doğu İpek at work

Jeanette Barnes is another example of an artist that uses her native city as  source material. London is seen as a city in constant change, she celebrates the hustle and bustle of its surging population and ever changing skyline. In contrast to Ipek who you feel sees the city as a necropolis, she sees it as a fountain of life. 

Jeanette Barnes at work.

Barnes works in charcoal, using a rubber to create an energetic surface mark quality, as well as allowing her to constantly adjust her drawings in relation to the unfolding spatial matrix she is creating. What both artists have in common is the scale they work on. When you see the actual drawings you can immerse yourself in them and this is an essential part of their quality. 

My own particular hero of city drawing is the architectural draftsman Hugh Ferriss.

Hugh Ferris

 His 1922 charcoal sketches of imaginary Manhattan skyscrapers. sketched out the implications of the new 'setback'  laws, which were brought in to ensure that light would still penetrate down to street level.  His images became iconic and still have a direct influence on my own drawings. 

The Phantom of Liberty

You can see the original 6ft high drawing of mine in the current LCA gallery exhibition 

The image above is one of two drawings that I made of monumental skyscraper type buildings, that were meant to stand for the idea of the modern city and its architecture in the mind of someone travelling to a Western European city from a 'third world' country. The drawings worked as a pair, one standing with the building standing upwards and the other upside down. The landscapes that these images joined were those of the urban landscape of Leeds and the rural landscape of the coastline of West Wittering. In particular there is a site in West Wittering called 'Roman Landing', which is where the Romans initially found access to our shores over 2000 years ago. I go down to West Wittering every year to draw, and that year I had been reading in the local paper about refugees landing on the coast and being picked up by local police. In my mind I began to tie together all these things; migration, a long view of history, the link between city and country, the idea of desire and how it shapes itself in the mind, the brutality of architecture and how an image might link all of these things together. In particular, I had been drawing tower blocks in Leeds, one of which had been used as temporary accommodation for asylum seekers. I was during this time also holding conversations with the people who lived in these towers and using these conversations to make other drawings that reflected the fact that people's ideas of what things might be like in England, had had to change dramatically once they confronted the reality of being here. 

Not here not there

I was also making other analogies at that time, As an artist one of the problems you are constantly faced with is whether or not to keep the focus narrow, or to look for several different ways to address the same issues. 

For instance one analogy was landing on the island of England as a sort of unwinnable game or diabolic fairground ride. I made several drawings of this idea, the one below being based on those water slides that weave their way down to a swimming pool, but this time of course, it is a slide for a boat, one that would direct it straight back into the sea. 

Island in the sun

Another analogy was that of the use of a ladder to be able to climb away from or out of the situation you find yourself in. 

This is not an oracle

The ceramic and wallpaper piece, This is not an oracle, tried to fuse together several ideas, the terracotta fragment of a building was based on the broken buildings we see in so many bombed out cities. The ladder is wobbly and leans against a wallpapered wall, the repeating pattern being when looked at closely a decent into hell. The base on which the whole thing stands is an inverted mountain, an analogy that had emerged from my then feeling that there was no logic to anything any more, everything was upside down. 

All of these images of mine began with making drawings in sketchbooks. This is the way I work. I do though have a flighty mind, so have a tendency to go off script. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's just how I am and why I'm an artist rather than a scientist. As students you will also at some point have to make a decision as to what sort of approach you have to the world. All I can say about that is have the courage of your own convictions. Several times in the past I have had tutors or critics tell me my approach is wrong, but the longer I have stuck to my guns, the easier I find it is to make work that I see as mine and not me trying to make work that I think others might like. 

See also:

Earlier Images of the City posts part 1 and 2

Drawing and urban acupuncture 

Some thoughts on observational drawing 

Mapping as translation