Wollheim suggests that art is a form of life, if so what makes it's heart beat? One sort of drawing is that which seeks to recapture the essence of the contact with another human being. The result of this encounter is one you could argue according to Wollheim, that is another form of life. If so, how do we read this life? How do we separate out those encounters that deaden the experience from those that embody it?
Drawings that record the struggle of the encounter always seem to offer to myself a more rewarding experience. So I thought it worthwhile looking at a few artists that still work in the traditional field of perceptual observation and that use the human figure as their core subject.
Ginny Grayson states that she slowly feels her way through the forms that she perceives, comparing her approach to a surgical process. She says this reflects the difficulty of pinning down reality or identity, and states that she often finds the ghostly residue or erasure preferable to the actual drawing. Grayson’s method involves numerous corrections using eraser and gesso, and by adding paper to areas worn thin by overworking. The worn and fragile surface of 'No conclusions drawn: self portrait' attests to the difficulties generated by her investigative process. The right panel of the diptych contains photographs showing earlier stages, lost as an inevitable part of her method, while date stamps on the drawing are intended as an ironic comment on the absurdity of trying to draw what one perceives.
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Drawings that record the struggle of the encounter always seem to offer to myself a more rewarding experience. So I thought it worthwhile looking at a few artists that still work in the traditional field of perceptual observation and that use the human figure as their core subject.
Ginny Grayson 'No conclusions drawn: self portrait'
Ginny Grayson states that she slowly feels her way through the forms that she perceives, comparing her approach to a surgical process. She says this reflects the difficulty of pinning down reality or identity, and states that she often finds the ghostly residue or erasure preferable to the actual drawing. Grayson’s method involves numerous corrections using eraser and gesso, and by adding paper to areas worn thin by overworking. The worn and fragile surface of 'No conclusions drawn: self portrait' attests to the difficulties generated by her investigative process. The right panel of the diptych contains photographs showing earlier stages, lost as an inevitable part of her method, while date stamps on the drawing are intended as an ironic comment on the absurdity of trying to draw what one perceives.
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Grayson sums up the problem of a perceptual encounter as being something virtually impossible, however in trying to record the event the image gradually evolves and as a viewer you can trace back the encounter by reliving the various stages of the drawing. I'm not so sure she needs to also give us the stages of its making by including the photographs but perhaps in this age dominated by the photographic image, new audiences need to be reassured by the photographic record. The grid of her looking is for me the main entry point into this work together with the way the drawing intensifies as it reaches the figure. The way the stomach gets blacker and blacker as she discovers where her weight lies, (I don't mean poundage, just visual focus) draws me to an off centre intensity. It's as if the drawing moves from a first of all 'it's not what it is but where it is' encounter, gradually into a second stage whereby she discovers what it is by looking for where it is. The marks and traces of looking change as she encounters her own image, outside of the figure they assert the underlying geometry of relationships, but once the figure is entrapped it begins to generate a new energy of internal dynamics, but an energy that is loosed into the surrounding space by the way the left arm in particular is broken by the rubber and therefore cut back into the space behind her, whist also being pulled into the growing mass of the body. It is the unravelling of the process that reveals the life of the looking and at this point this is what for me gives the drawing life. Notice how the long straight of the table in the foreground is broken several times. If the line had no interruptions it would flatten the foreground space, but as it is, the broken line allows the eyes to inhabit both the established foreground space and also travel back into the rest of the image's spaces. As you look into the space behind the table a rhythmic play of partly revealed rectangles begins, rectangles that are partly a response to things seen, (edges of boards, canvases etc) and partly a response to the imagined grid of looking. A grid she has either developed from the use of perhaps a plumb-line or a horizontally and vertically held pencil measure, a grid that in the process of the actual drawing has a history in the way she has come to do the looking. As someone who has drawn for a long time I now no longer use my aids to measurement such as plumb-lines and verticals and horizontals, it's as if that grid is locked into my head and I 'see' angles and relationships as if the physical checks were still there and it may well be a similar situation with Grayson when she draws, not that it really matters. What does matter is that in order to try to capture the ephemeral nature of looking, an artist needs something to hang on to.
All is chaos until something is brought into the situation to stabilise it.
Ginny Grayson
It's interesting to compare one of Ginny Grayson's head drawings with one of Frank Auerbach's.
Frank Auerbach
Auerbach is looking for something else here. The grid you feel is not there, he is searching for the monumentality of the encounter. Looking I suspect now as much at the drawing as at the image. In comparison with Auerbach's drawing, the 'space lines' that suggest perhaps a collar that Grayson uses to create a space for the bottom half of the drawing to exist in, feel almost mannered. Grayson is still in an intellectual control of the drawing, while Auerbach after a long time of searching for something has just at some point had to stop working, you get the sense that he is always feeling for the image, rather than trying to arrive at a 'look' or preconceived idea of a resolution. The drawing has almost disintegrated under his searching for some sort of reality. Black marks seep into the solid of the body but this time ooze into the space behind rather that slit the space open. Both artists use the frame of the drawing to give their sitters a strong presence, Grayson in particular pushes the mass of the head out into our space, whilst Auerbach's head appears to be wanting to knock its solidity against its frame. These drawings reward close and slow looking, both artists have given us a rewarding experience based on an encounter with another human being. I'm personally more drawn to the Auerback image, in the end because it is more awkward, more difficult, but Grayson's image can be equally rewarding, as it has a strong grasp of how dark light reversal can be used to heighten an awareness of form. The facial modelling is much more subtle than Auerbach's and suggestive of individual character, Auerbach's suggestive of a more universal encounter with a human being, rather than with a particular person.
Ginny Grayson
The two drawings above are also date stamped, the printed dates playing off against the marks that determine the space within which each head sits again coalescing around the areas of perceptual focus. Each drawing begins to set up its own vibration patterns, reminding us that we are all at a microscopic level simply a vibrating mass of atoms and electrons.
The portrait drawings of Ann Gale fit into this same category, but there are subtle differences.
Ann Gale
The frame of looking is established right from the start A drawn rectangle surrounding the image is used to establish almost a weaving frame support. The mass gradually emerges from the space, each horizontal or vertical finding line trying to literally pin down the image. Secondary marks attempt to find their way onto the surface of the figure, bending out of the rigid mesh of woven grid lines. A totally different rhythm is established, even though the perceptual problem is similar. The looking is much more fragile and tentative, the marks less substantial and less energetic than those used by Grayson in the two portraits above.
The framing of space and the finding of that frame are most clearly seen in Gale's most famous artistic predecessor, Giacometti.
Giacometti
All of these artists have an artistic forefather in Cezanne, his attempts to put together his 'petite sensations' were always struggles to grasp what he was seeing rather than attempts to depict a subject and he pioneered a way of drawing and painting that left open to the viewer the various changes and differences that take place when you look at something over time.
Cezanne
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Thanks to the author...
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