Beuys and Cotman at Leeds City Art Gallery

Leeds City Art Gallery has finally opened after refurbishing and the new rooms are superb. In particular the central upstairs space is bathed in natural light and is a wonderful space for showing sculpture. 
Two of the opening exhibitions are of particular interest for the drawing community, the staging of a large show of the gallery's Cotman holdings and the Joseph Beuys 'Artist's Rooms' display. 
If you have never looked at Cotman before you will be surprised at how modern he can seem. He breaks the landscape down into abstracted chunks and eliminates details and in doing so prefigures the way artist's of the 20th century would begin to select out forms from nature. However what really interested me was the display of his pencil drawings.

Cotman

The drawings were located on shelves, simply leaning against the wall, 4 or 5 to a row, still attached to their supporting card backing. A glass sheet was then fixed over the lengths of wood shelving in order to protect the drawings from the public. A very neat method of presenting a diverse range of small shapes and sizes. 

By displaying the drawings in this way it meant that I could get up really close and look at how the images were made. 

Cotman

I was immediately taken with a drawing of some weeds. I suppose it was because drawings like this are ones I have done many times, usually thinking "this will come in handy at some point", made when wandering the streets collecting visual information for some future foreground detail. Because I have drawn this type of situation myself I can also empathise with the selection of the composition. Cotman is keen to locate the plants selected in a space, a few marks indicating other grasses and plants are enough to ground his image. Looking back on the sketchbook drawing (1) below, taken from one of my old sketchbooks, my effort looks very isolated and because the sense of space is poor, the drawing lacks life. I can remember at the time not wanting to get down on my knees to sort out the visual entanglement of other plants around the base and this is probably why the drawing is lacking in attention to a specific experience. 

Sketchbook drawing 1

Sketchbook drawing 2

My sketchbook drawing (2) in retrospect seems a much better record of an experience, the few brushed in indications of other plants create a sense of space that (1) doesn't have.  

As I stood looking at these small drawings of Cotman's, I was becoming more and more aware of the embodied nature of their understanding. Because these are things I have drawn, I begin to re-enact their making in my body. Each stroke Cotman makes is meaningful to me intellectually and physically. The hand is still holding the pencil, the arm is still moving, the elbow tracing a smooth curve as it pushes and pulls the lower arm across the paper, the shoulder now aware of a change of pressure as the hand is pulled off the paper and dropped down again as a leaf is found in space next to a rising plant stalk. I'm in Cotman's body, I inhabit his mind, his hand and his eyes. I'm affected by the plants he drew, their presence still echoing through time, their effect still potent after all these years. I know this, I know I am both Cotman and the small weeds he once perceived on a day when he had his paper and drawing implements with him. We are drawn together as I re-animate the artist and the stimulus for his perceptions, the old drawing's agency is powerful, taking a strong hold of me. 

Most of the drawings in this display are in pencil. Like many artists I draw with pencil to capture ideas and images as they either come to me perceptually or via the inner workings of my imagination. In the morning before going to the art gallery I had been working on another image of an eye in the corn. 

Eye in the corn

The image above would not have come to me without in the past standing next to a wheat field and drawing it. (Sketchbook drawing 3). 

Sketchbook drawing 3

The Cotman drawings are collected together in an area adjacent to a much larger gallery in which a comprehensive display of his finished watercolours is on exhibition. That connection between what you are aiming for as an artist and what you need to collect from your experiences is very important. In this case it was for myself interesting to see how he had at times been on a very similar journey. Tiny drawings of horizon lines were of particular interest for me as they made me very aware of the importance of linear rhythm, especially on that line that separates the land from the sky. 

Cotman: studies of the horizon

Again I'm both reminded of my own drawing experiences and taken over by these little scraps of information. The way that you look across a landscape is determined by how the experience is punctuated by events. Once again I am engrossed by these indications and quickly aware of how Cotman would have been engaged in the experience. For him a windmill stands out, for myself a mosque. But for both of us the edge between sky and land is a linear experience, an experience that reflects the material presence of the world and the way that it shapes us. 

Detail of Leeds horizon from a large drawing

In the main gallery devoted to Cotman's watercolours is a drawing on which he had spent a much longer time. Titled, "An effect of Parhelion seen from Hunstanton Lighthouse on July 6 1816", Cotman had obviously been deeply impressed by a powerful natural phenomenon. 

Cotman: An effect of Parhelion...

Cotman both writes about and draws an image of the event, a rare occurrence and one which is centred on light and our perception of it. Here we see his response to the 'effect' of the world, his being acted upon by world events, shaped and in turn shaping the experience. 

An effect of Parhelion... is an image we might well place as one of those belonging to the tradition of the sublime. Cotman is also an artist that uses his drawing materials in a much more expressive manner, the drawing of a road disappearing into the mist below, demonstrating that he isn't always about sharply defined areas and flat shapes.  

Cotman

On the ground floor of the art gallery there are also three rooms devoted to the work of Joseph Beuys. It may at first appear as if Beuys and Cotman are worlds apart in both sensibility and effect, but as I wondered through the galleries I began to feel that they were in fact very similar. 

Beuys: Pregnant woman with swan

Drawing is for both these artists central to their practice. Both are happy to work ideas out on scraps of paper or card and they both have an instinct for abstraction. The profile of a pregnant woman above being as much as a simplification as any of Cotman's abstracted landscapes. 

Beuys: Energy Field

Beuys' drawings are also records of performances and he often uses a particular brown coloured floor paint for his later drawings. These images feel as if they are about traces of events and so did Cotman's drawings. Both artists are offering us records of their material engagement with the world, Beuys is much more aware of this, often talking about the meaning of fat and felt and other materials, but Cotman is obviously aware himself that his ideas are being shaped by the properties of the materials he chooses to use. Both artists abstract elements out of the process of their complex entanglement with experience and the matter that shapes that experience. The consequence of these experiences is relayed to me and as an entity made of similar stuff to both artists, I am 'tuned' into the way materials are being shaped to form ideas. Beuys is though a 20th century creature, he is aware of a post quantum world, a world of relativity and the atomic bomb, so is therefore much more attuned to energy flows and the transmutation of matter. Beuys has a type of political awareness that Cotman doesn't have, but there are politics of the picturesque that Cotman would have had to deal with that we are perhaps not as aware of as we should be. 
I have on purpose spent more time writing about Cotman than Beuys, even though Beuys as an artist was much more influential on my own practice and was one of those artists that I was fortunate enough to actually meet. My point is that the act itself of drawing is such a special one in that it carries with it a material value, a physical entanglement with the world that writing never does. In those small pieces of paper I could sense the reality of experiences, in a way that the words on this screen never could. I am asking the reader to go and look at some actual 'real' drawings and to open themselves out to their own embodied world. To try and feel that invisible but palpable pencil or pen in their hand and to re-trace the time of a drawing's making. No matter how tiny and ephemeral a drawing may be it is a physical, material idea and as such is a reminder of our own and the world's material agency. 

Both these exhibitions are well worth visiting and there is of course the added bonus of being able to visit the new displays upstairs in the gallery. 

Find more information on the Leeds City art gallery here

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