Drawings in the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester

I have been drawing down on the South Coast and because I was in the area, dropped into the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. If you are down in that part of the country there is much to interest anyone with an interest in drawing. The exhibition in the De’Longhi Print Room, ‘Women Artists: The Female Gaze’ which runs until15th October 2017 was particularly interesting as it is a carefully selected group of high quality prints focusing on various narratives of femininity.  Women artists’ representations of women are a welcome reminder that so much of art history is stuffed with men’s representations of women.  There were prints by Laura Knight, Cathie Pilkington, Moyna Flannigan, Laura Ford, Shani Rhys James, Gwen Hardie, Lys Hansen, Prunella Cough, Jennifer McRae, Joyce Cairns, Paula Rego, Kiki Smith and Suzanne Valadon, as well as an excellent charcoal drawing by Dinora Mendelson. 

Cathie Pilkington is using Mokulito lithography techniques to get a particular surface quality that reminded me of Cecil Collins. She is also a sculptor and I could see why she was using this technique as it allows an artist very subtle control over the development of surface textural marks in space. Her work was of particular relevance to me as I had been looking for a replacement for traditional lithographic stones or zinc plates, and this technique also allows me to use my etching press, as you don't have to use a dedicated litho press to take impressions from the plywood plates. 

Cathie Pilkington

Moyna Flannigan: The Blind House No.4

Moyna Flannigan is an artist whose work I have seen before in Glasgow. She is another of those artists that seem to have taken up a position that straddles on the one hand a traditional Goya-esque gaze that ruefully comments on the issues of the day and yet on the other hand she seems to be able to reference a contemporary mode which is much more playful and perhaps a product of immersion into comic books at a much younger age. I like her work and will continue to follow where she takes her imagery; she talks about her work in this video. 

Shani Rhys James is a Welsh artist that if you are working figuratively and expressively you ought to be aware of, she is probably one of the most underrated artists of her generation. I don't have an image of the print she had in the exhibition, so I'll leave you with one of her charcoal drawings. 

Shani Rhys James: The Black Cot

Jennifer McRae is a useful artist to look at if you are thinking about portraiture. She appears to find a way into the psychology of her sitters that doesn't sit 'outside' of the situation. She inhabits the world of the people she engages with, or at least seems to mesh her own subjectivity into theirs. This is perhaps what I took from this exhibition as something to learn from. There is as aspect of being male and of my generation, which is about coldness and distance. Not all men of course, if you compare Cecil Collins with Euan Uglow you get two artists with diametrically opposing world views. Even at my age, I'm still trying to clarify the relationship between my own world view and how I make images, but that's OK I only have myself to answer to on that score. 

Jennifer McRae

Thinking of the male gaze, a key proponent of the art of measurement was being exhibited in one of the upstairs galleries. The exhibition ‘William Coldstream: Measuring Reality’ brought together a small but very representative body of his paintings, as well as a few drawings. His style of teaching life drawing was still very influential when I was at college, and I well remember having to use the horizontal and vertical point fixing process to develop grids of finding across the surface of my life drawings. Looked at again I see his work as being too focused on the method. I found his little red and sometimes not red painted dots and dashes, and then around them, very tame, bits of ‘filled-in’ painting, irritating. It felt as if he could never really take on board the implications of what he was trying to do. If it was all in the measurement, then why bother to fill in the figure behind the grid of finding? I thought the work looked very mannered; the process itself becoming a style. This understanding of his work feeling somewhat paradoxical, as it is directly in opposition to what I remember being taught at the time, and this was that by using a grid of looking one would be able to avoid stylisation and be able to focus on the observation of reality. I found this work so dull and almost bureaucratic in comparison to the images I had just seen in the Female Gaze exhibition. All observational drawings contain a high degree of subjectivity, we select out from the world what we are interested in and Coldstream was no different. However he was in a position of power and his vision and associated teaching processes had a tremendous influence on others. Looking at the work of Euan Uglow and Myles Murphy, you can see Coldstream’s grids stalking them like trigonometric ghosts.

William Coldstream

I well remember going to the John Moores' Liverpool painting prize exhibition in 1974, Myles Murphy's painting 'Figure with Yellow Foreground' had won. I thought at the time how regressive painting was, and how it had still not been able to escape the life room, I couldn't believe anyone could be convinced by the abstract blocks of colour situated around an Uglow/Coldstream coloured in life drawing. However I was soon to be asked to teach life drawing on the Foundation course at Leeds and Murphy was one of the artists I would show students when I was trying to get them to grasp some sort of underlying form. Looking back I still find these images overly mannered and suffering from an avoidance of life, rather than a confrontation with it, which was if I remember rightly, often a life room mantra. 

Myles Murphy: 'Figure with Yellow Foreground'

Myles Murphy: Figure Study of a Woman

There is a 'school' of English artists that are associated with the Slade painting method. Most of which I find very reserved and cold, but occasionally an image will jump out at me or stick in my head, such as Patrick Symons' 'Dracaena and Diagrams'. It's the fine lines of the plant's thin leaves, set off against the painted rendering of pencil drawn diagrams that fascinates me. The initial drawings for the plant and the wooden stand, would have been of a similar nature to the pencil drawings on the canvas backs, but were gradually painted over as the image was arrived at. At some point within the evolution of the image the artist would have had to work hard to sit the diagrams back into the painterly surface and it's this interplay between the underlying diagram of composition and painted diagrams that ticks backwards and forwards in my mind and gives the painting some sort of life. 

Dracaena and Diagrams by Patrick Symons

Robert Dukes: Drawing after Millet

Robert Dukes is an artist associated with the old Slade painting school, however I am drawn to his work more than several of his contemporaries, simply because I feel he had more of an awareness of the essence of things. In the drawing above from Millet the compact energy of the farm labourers is what he has concentrated on, this being the essential message of the Millet. The painting of a cup below seems to have moved on beyond a showy set of measurements and is now simply a painting about the essence of 'cup-ness'. He seems more attuned to the inner life of things.

Robert Dukes

Euan Uglow 

Euan Uglow is seen as the quintessential post Coldstream artist. However of all Uglow's drawings it is perhaps small sketches like the one above that I warm to. The grid of finding is still there and the subject is 'caged' already in the rectangles of composition. However the 'sketch' still has an informality that comes from 'fast' looking, it is still being arrived at and in its arrival a certain fragility and tentativeness is captured in the very line quality of a pencil drifting quickly across the paper surface. Look at the three horizontal lines that touch the left side of the door or window frame that partly frames the model. Each line is a wavered uncertainty and yet as they gather to the left of the vertical they establish a particular space. In their uncertainty they become certain. It's that hesitant uncertain/certainty that I often respond to in a drawing. It suggests to me that the artist is lost and is yet still looking. A state we all need to be in if we are to find something new. 

There was also a very interesting John Minton exhibition on and an associated exhibition, 

'A Different Light: British Neo-Romanticism', both of which I enjoyed immensely and will at some point return to, as both these exhibitions had a lot to say about the nature of British drawing and its reliance on a tradition that looks back to both Blake and Palmer.  

John Minton: Surrey landscape 1944

Thinking about Blake, I was in Venice recently and saw Damien Hirst's recent exhibition, if you have been you will have seen his own gigantic reference to Blake. 

William Blake: Ghost of a Flea

Damien Hirst: Demon's head

See also:

More on life drawing and Coldstream 

More on Moyna Flannigan

Thoughts on the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester

Bury Art Gallery