Simon English: Taking the rough with the smooth

Simon English: Drawing installation 

I have a book of Simon English's drawings and have often turned to his work when I have been looking for visual solutions to ideas that require the compacting of very different sensibilities. He is a very gifted drawer with a sophisticated touch, one that I suspect he has to work hard at to stop it getting in the way of what he has to say. I'll try and explain. 

The raw imagery set into the corner of a gallery with rough red horizontal and vertical lines scrawled into the background is by the same person who made the delicate drawings on the page above. 

Simon English: Details and salon hang of a block of drawings

There are two sides to sexuality. One is the tender caring side and the other is the rough sexual ride that sometimes seems to overpower a relationship. My experience is that these things are never easy, in fact their fascination is the roller-coaster ride of life's far edges. English is gay, but same sex couples have to face the same complex set of issues that all relationships have to face. Caring is good but sometimes boring, violence is bad but sometimes inescapable, even if inexcusable. Life is a contradiction and Simon English's drawings embrace that contradiction. 

Simon English: Single images and combination wall

Even within a single image English will have delicate and rough, or sophisticated and naive drawing sensibilities mashed up together. We often approach aesthetic judgement as a sort of overall framework within which we can sense an artist's touch or sensibility. Here we have the aesthetics of clumsy fragility, of crass sophistication and dumb intelligence. His images operate like lost fragments of a love story, we have to make up the missing bits, why did that face seem so ugly and disjointed one day and yet remind you of the pleasures of Classical Art the next? Why is the sweet memory of last year's love sullied by a feeling of physical rejection? Every bright moment has its shadow; and it is often the case that the brighter the light the darker the shadow. Cupid's arrow can pierce the heart as well as the arse and being blind his aim is rarely true. 

I have been trying to reconcile the visualisation of interoceptual experience with my perceptual experiences, the inner and the outer and am sometimes puzzled as to how to reconcile the various languages that emerge, Simon English helps me to think through possible answers. 

See also:

Fuseli and modern women

Drawing and sexual politics 

The split

A line of disjuncture: the tear

The salon hang