Jeanette Barnes drawings in Halifax

Jeanette Barnes

I was in Halifax over the weekend and unexpectedly came across some of Jeanette Barnes's drawings in the main Dean Clough Gallery. If you are in Halifax it is well worth a visit to the Dean Clough arts complex, not just for Barnes's drawings but to explore the full range of work that they have on display.
However it is Barnes that I wanted to look at in more detail, especially as she is an artist I have long admired and have posted about before. See this post on drawing the city.  
Barnes has one of her large drawings on exhibition, alongside several smaller drawings and images that mix print processes with drawing. It is the large, approximately five feet wide drawing that captures your attention, both because it is so well worked and because the spaces she develops are so convincing. The surface vibrates with her many decisions, some left and others removed, some sure and others not so sure, the whole surface gradually knitting itself together not as a smoothly woven cloth but as a constantly emerging and retreating exploration of perception. Her work has that quality of uncertain certainty that I have also commented on before and of course it is another practice that stems from Cezanne's questioning of what is out there and this relates to a philosophy of doubt.

Jeanette Barnes

When looking at Barnes' drawings above all I find them life affirming, they capture the excitement of looking, the looking is translated into the energy of life in the mark, the size of each drawing being directly related to the body's experience of the drawing's making.

Jeanette Barnes



The smaller drawings are also worth looking at because she changes the quality of the marks, obviously as she makes a small drawing she can see everything at once, so there is less moving backwards and forwards in order to see how different marks sit in relation to the surface of the picture plane. When printmaking, she sometimes responds to the first pulls of an etching plate, working against the surety of the printed mark, and adding a layer of more discovered spaces that interpenetrate the initial printed spaces and at other times in mono-prints she works with the flow of the surface as it emerges out of the turpentine/ink chaos of movement.

Jeanette Barnes: Print

Jeanette Barnes continues an old and important tradition of going out into the streets of the city and drawing and this is something that can still reap rich rewards.