Drawing in colour 3 The drawings of Patrick Hall

Patrick Hall: Rainbow

Stones and weather and eyes and clouds, things of an elemental nature are all to be found in Patrick Hall's drawings. There is a wonderful catalogue of his drawings taken from a show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art that is in the university library and it is well worth a close study. My feeling is that his drawings bear comparison with those of Ken Kiff another artist that drew in colour and who has sometimes been written off as a fantasist, but who I would see as a psychological realist. 
Hall works from dreams or poetry and his work could be seen as a type of mystical response to contemporary life. However, perhaps because I have used several of the themes that crop up in his work in my own, I would like to think that his work is more grounded in reality than you might think on first observation.  (I'm still trying to unpick my comments about originality from my last post, and will revisit the ideas surrounding originality again, as I think its one of those awkward issues that relates to value and in a consumer society originality and value get mixed up)

The protecting wings II

It rains in Spain 

The image above is about rain. It's about the solid reality of clouds and our insignificance in the face of weather. Clouds can be like rocks, they are simply things of a different timeframe, but of a similar objectless. Ink and chalk and washes are similar to clouds. They may or may not be a sign of something. A grey cloud might mean imminent rain, or it might mean just a grey day.  Material thinking is embedded in objectness, and my recent post on object orientated ontology has perhaps flagged up for some of you the fact that I'm interested in the impossible possibilities of thinking from non human points of view. I like to ask questions that have no answers in words, such as "Can a drawing think?" If so how does it think? In some of Hall's drawings I can glimpse answers. The materials are moving about, small ink circles perhaps becoming rain drops collecting in the top strata of a fast emptying cloud, lines of verticality become rain drops now running down a window, the earth a bendy horizontal browning and edging itself in black that touches a dirty yellow atmosphere. The tiny figures of post-human presences are barely there, they stand beneath the cloud, they endure but are no longer a force, simply a series of small insignificant moments in comparison with the footstep of the cloud, a grey stamp that splashes through the yellow swirl, flattening the sky and dampening the spirits of those few who turned out to witness the fact. 

The language of marks made as water swirls and colours coagulate and separate out is both alchemic and geologic. A syntax is revealed that is as much organic as inorganic, as much a language for humans as for a weather system. The tiny stick figures in these images  so insignificant that they have no function beyond that of reminders as to the scale of elemental processes and to bear some sort of witness to forces far beyond their capacity to understand or to have any agency in relation to the shaping of events. 

Link to these other posts on drawing in colour
Drawing in colour
Drawing in colour part two

Drawing in colour part four

Colour and control

Drawings on show in Leeds City Art Gallery

Anne Hardy: Installation view 'Falling and Walking'

It’s nearly always worthwhile checking out your local art gallery at least once a month. Exhibitions change and a new arrangement of their existing collection can reveal new things about often seen work that you might have become overly familiar with. So as you return to university after the Easter break why not pop in to see whats on?

Leeds City Art Gallery has two drawing themed exhibitions on at the moment. The focus on the drawings used to develop the installation ‘Falling and Walking’ by Anne Hardy is really useful to look at if you are thinking about how drawing can be used as a way of thinking about large scale ideas and how they might be realised. Anne Hardy uses a combination of model making and drawing in order to both work her ideas out and to communicate them to other people. Most of the drawings are quick sketches of ideas, you get the sense that drawings are very much ‘what ifs’ for Hardy and that the models are where she gets t grips with the nuts and bolts of how things might actually work. She often uses watercolour wash to establish a feeling for a space and what might activate it and ballpoint pen to scribble out a fast idea or to hold on to a thought before it disappears.

Ann Hardy: Thinking drawings and a model of installation ideas

Adjacent to the display of Anne Hardy’s drawings and models is a very interesting display of the gallery’s collection of two-dimensional work by artists that we usually think of as sculptors. This was very informative and once again highlighted the role that drawing plays in so many artists’ working methodologies. It was personally interesting for myself because one of the first drawings on display was ‘Crossed Beds’ by Jenny West, a fellow colleague at the Leeds Arts University and one that I worked alongside for many years when I worked on the foundation course. Jenny is well known for her very technical approach to drawing,  using tightly controlled perspective drawing projections. In the drawing on display she uses a variety of surface qualities to soften and sharpen different areas of the drawing in order to emphasise the planar movement of her spatial grids and to humanise the technical approach she uses to nail down the image. It was impossible to photograph the image through the glass it was framed behind, so all I can do is give you a ghost image of the drawing, one that has my own body standing within the centre of its crossed grids. 

Jenny West (Crossed Beds: Image behind glass)

Jenny’s drawing is positioned right next to two Claes Oldenburg images. Both of his drawings rely on a very strong sense of how scale can be manipulated in order to give drama and power to an image. The first larger drawing is of a faucet or as we would put it in England a tap. The tap is on and water pours from it in a vertical column. The image is designed to look as if the tap is huge and an architectural insert into a park or garden.  Here perspective is used very technically in order to give authenticity to Oldenburg’s vision of what an everyday item might be like if it was elevated to the scale of a huge landscape feature.

Oldenburg: Proposal for a cathedral in the form of a sink faucet for lake Union, Seattle

A small much looser drawing of cigarette ends is also in show, it is also designed to get an audience to see how these throwaway items could become monumental. These two drawings give you a snapshot into Oldenburg’s mind and you quickly realise how good a draftsman he is. The images are drawn with a consummate command of the materials he is using, whether he is making a swift sketch or a more detailed technical drawing, he is in total command of the process.

Phyllida Barlow: exhibition installation of coloured drawings

Phyllida Barlow

On the opposite wall is a collection of A1 size coloured drawings by Phyllida Barlow. Her drawings are made independently of her three dimensional work, and unlike the Oldenburg drawings are not preparatory sketches or visualisations of ideas but works in their own right. You could think of them as compositions, or freeform arrangements of colour and surface materials, as thin coloured sculpture or flat environments. This distinction between sculptors that use drawing to visualise what might be and those that use it to explore other possibilities runs throughout the display and highlights a key distinction between those using drawing in the old sense of 'disegno' and those who see drawing as a discipline that has its own autonomy, those that in effect treat drawing as an object in its own right.

Alison Wilding

Alison Wilding is an interesting case in point, she uses drawing to explore concepts that she has also realised in 3D, not to visualise more 3D versions, but to create some alternative 2D possibilities that exist as images in their own right. Rose Leverton’s ‘Dinner table beneath the floor proposal’ is of course in the other camp, the drawing is showing us a possibility.

Rose Leverton

The person that perhaps opens out the most conceptually interesting approach to drawing is Cornelia Parker. Her ‘Dead match exposed by a live one’ uses simple photographic technology (literally drawing with light) to produce a photogram of a burnt-out match, brought back to life again by the light of a newly stricken one, in the form of a glowing white silhouette. Parker is conceptually playing with us, getting us to see a beautiful connection between how an image is made and what the image is of.

Cornelia Parker: From ‘Dead match exposed by a live one’ 

The Cornelia Parker image was impossible to photograph because like most of the drawings on display it was behind glass. However it does give me a chance to show you a view of the exhibition as reflected in her photogram and it offers a timely reminder that all of the drawings shown in these blog posts are digital images rendered from photographic exposures. I am always having to write about a topic that is never actually seen, but only referred to. In many ways this demonstrates the power of photography, it is so embedded into digital technology that I often forget how it is shaping and processing everything that I refer to, so perhaps for a while I might turn my attention to 'drawing with light' and see how as a way of thinking it re-conceptualises what I have been trying to articulate in relation to drawing as an extended practice. 
In the meantime do try whenever possible to go and see original artwork, drawings are so much more like objects when you see them in the flesh, the camera lens flattens and de-textures everything, as well as resizing images to fit screen world formats. 

Same as it always was

Diego Rivera, Cartoon of The 'Manufacture of Poisonous Gas Bombs' 

(Detroit Industry Mural, north wall) 1932

The news from Syria is as always horrid. The use of poisonous gas another descent into the hell that human beings can build for themselves. Trying to draw in these circumstances seems fruitless and of such little value. The drawing above by Rivera a timely reminder that all of these things are manufactured and the arms industries of 'advanced' Western nations continue to grow and grow. In fact the UK prides itself on its achievements in this area, as a government spokesman states, “The UK is one of the world’s most successful defence exporters, averaging second place in the global rankings on a rolling ten-year basis, making it Europe’s leading defence exporter in the period.” How good to know we are a 'defence exporter' and not an attack exporter or warmonger. 

The manufacture of poison gas is accompanied by the manufacture of gas masks, companies profiting from both the gas and the source of protection from it. We first of all worked out that we could protect ourselves from airborne diseases by making protective masks for doctors during a time of plague. But our knowledge of chemistry has now improved. There is something of the alien about people in masks, something of the worst fears, fear of not touching others, of isolating every part of our bodies from contact with what should be life affirming, the very air we breath. 

The drawings below are not drawn to shock or to have emotional impact, they are simply illustrations of what existed, all taken from an illustrated history of the gas mask and yet in their very straightforwardness they are as horrid as the most powerful images of Goya.

Although I can sometimes think there is no way that as an artist you can respond to these issues that doesn't mean that we have to give up. 

Jill Gibbon: The sweet sound of violins with a tank background

There is an exhibition on at the moment in the Bradford Peace Museum of the work of the Yorkshire artist Jill Gibbon, who for the last 10 years has been going undercover at international arms industry trade events in order to expose what goes on.  In 2007, Gibbon applied for accreditation to that year’s Defence and Security Equipment International fair in London as an ‘official war artist’ and she explained that she was particularly keen to practice drawing tanks. (The fact that they accepted this reason, perhaps being an indication of how these people think) Since then she has under a variety of disguises attended several of these events, always taking her sketchbook in order to record her experiences.  Gibbon describes these events as full of “beautifully lit military equipment, girls in short skirts with trays of Champagne and an atmosphere more reminiscent of a high end car show than an arms fair”. At one event she was offered complementary rubber stress balls in the shape of grenades and at another free sweets their wrappers decorated with the words ‘Welcome to Hell’. Her sketchbooks document the sale of high-grade weapons with the potential to kill thousands of people, in environments completely normalised and constructed to appear as if people are buying a new car or replacement white goods. 

Jill Gibbon with one of her sketchbooks.

Installation view of sketchbook pages

The Bradford Peace Museum is located at 10 PIECE HALL YARD, BRADFORD, BD1 1PJ and is open on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays 10am till 4pm

Read this article on Gibbon's work

Find link to Gibbon's website and new book here

See also: 

The drawings of Michael Sandle