Drawing : Leeds Art gallery

Showing posts with label Leeds Art gallery. Show all posts

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Leeds Art Gallery

It is a wonderful time to go and visit Leeds City Art Gallery at the moment, especially if you are interested in portraits. The new exhibition, 'To Improvise a Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates', has been developed by the artist in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring, and although developed as a touring show, it sets up a series of fascinating associations and connections with work already on display in the gallery. I have seen several exhibitions containing Yiadom-Boakye's paintings of people; her imaginary compositions developed from photographs, life-drawings and found images and was curious to see how she drew as well as painted. She has also curated this exhibition, so it was a chance to see her wider interests in terms of image making, something that we sometimes forget is very important to all artists if they are to continually refresh their eyes and their minds. The focus of this blog is of course on drawing, but sometimes artists who draw and hand make images, also need to look at photography, if only to think about the differences between the two representational systems. Yiadom-Boakye's curation does that well, in particular because of her interest in Sickert, she gives us a reminder of his role in stitching together relationships between the two practices. He at times painted portraits of well-known personalities and when he did, his compositions and images were often derived from press photographs.

Sickert: King Edward the VII

Probably the most well known example of Sickert's relationship with photography is his portrait of King Edward the VII, the cropping being probably something he learnt from Degas. As artists began to respond to the photographic image, one of the most interesting issues was how we were reminded of how composed paintings were. One of Yiadom-Boakye's chosen artists, Lisa Brice, is I sense very aware of Sickert, but is now taking the concept of the frame and how it cuts into reality, in another direction, this time using it as a way to reconnect with images of women as framed by men in paintings. She is not like Sickert, casting a photograph into paint, but re-casting the roles of women who inhabit older painting, this time giving them a much greater agency in the image. An agency I personally recognise that can be derived from the act of smoking, the taking up of which at one time, I felt to be an anti-authoritarian snub to my father. It's interesting how easily personal history interweaves itself into the way we find meaning in our experiences. We might love our fathers, but we need to take actions that ensure we don't end up living life under their shadow and I sense that is partly what Brice is saying in these images, she loves painting's history, but needs to re-cast it as something she owns.

Lisa Brice

Lisa Brice's other painting was I thought just as powerful and in its handling of materials, was an image I could associate with even more closely. I first saw Lisa Brice's work at the Tate and was at the time particularly drawn to this image of another smoking woman.

Lisa Brice: Parting at Dusk (2018) gouache on polyester drafting film

The blue gouache paint streaks down the drafting film, a surface I have often worked on myself, as you use it in printmaking to hold and transfer gestural qualities when making silkscreen exposures. She translates William Rothenstein's Parting at Morning's material handling into something far more visceral, the paint standing for itself, rather than being a vehicle for representing fragility. Brice is also making another translation, taking Rothenstein's representation and shifting its meaning, this is no longer an image of a frail white woman left by a man in the morning, it now becomes a woman of unidentifiable race, that will leave before the night, and who stands her ground, smoking defiantly.

William Rothenstein Parting at Morning (1891, chalk, pastel and bronze paint on paper

Yiadom-Boakye is obviously interested in how painting's past can be revisited and she has chosen to exhibit one of her own responses to this.

Sickert: The Blackbird of Paradise

Sickert's 'Blackbird of Paradise' painting has long been part of the Leeds Art Gallery collection and it first drew Yiadom-Boakye's attention when she was undertaking some teaching at the Leeds Metropolitan University. During a break she had gone down to the Art Gallery and found a wonderful portrait that is suggestive not only of how humans can be bird like, but how paint itself can inhabit different creatures or materials, sometimes being feathery but at other times slimy like a wet frog or dry like sandstone or an elephant's skin. It was also a study in blackness, of how one colour can be many; blue blacks, green blacks, violet blacks, transparent, impasto, gestural and solid; a reminder of how great painters give life to the paint they use, in order to give life to the subjects they depict.

Sunbird 2 and 3

Yiadom-Boakye's imaginary portrait drawings, 'Sunbird 2' and 'Sunbird 3' are direct responses to Sickert's painting. At the core of my fascination with her work, is the fact that her portraits are imaginary. She forces us to confront what I think is a central issue in our understanding of portraiture, how much of our understanding of it is due to our obsession with what someone looks like and how much is it a reflection of how we read human beings as types. If, she suggests, an artist is to give life to her subject, she has to first of all give life to the materials used to depict that subject and if that is successfully accomplished, this new life, will be read and responded to as any other human being. Sometimes understood as a stereotype, or cliché and at other times as a particular individual that you can have empathy with; the reading is in the power of the beholder.

Upstairs in the art gallery there are two other exhibitions focused on portraits. One which has been there for quite a while and a new exhibition focused on portraits of women, an exhibition that has to be shown in very low light levels due to the fragility of the various papers on which the works chosen were made. Between the three presentations there are some very interesting comparisons to be made.

Yiadom-Boakye: Charcoal on paper

Jacob Kramer: Drawing for 'Mother'

Two similar sized drawings, both using charcoal are to be found on exhibition. One by Yiadom-Boakye is downstairs in the exhibition 'To Improvise a Mountain' and one by Jacob Kramer, is in the drawings of women exhibition upstairs. Although both drawings use similar mediums and sizes the handling is very different. It is perhaps easier to see in a detail, especially as it is very hard to photograph images behind glass.

Yiadom-Boakye

Jacob Kramer

Yiadom-Boakye's hand is a simple solid, the charcoal is blocked in and heavily worked with a rubber. The charcoal is pushed into the paper, using it feels like a good sized block of compressed charcoal, as opposed to a willow charcoal. Kramer's is softer and more delicate. He uses willow charcoal, smoothing out his tonal changes by smudging with his fingers and making highlights with a sharpened rubber. He is feeling for the form of the hand as an extension of the expression of the face, whilst in comparison Yiadom-Boakye's hand is more generic, perhaps even more mechanical, definitely a hand designed to punch more than to express a continuation of the 'read' of the face. Both artists are seeking some sort of authentic communication, trying to express something about what it is to be part of a community that has historically for one reason or another been overlooked. As people from my own family, came as Jews to the UK in the late nineteenth century, I am very aware of the pogroms that Kramer is asking us to remember. His family lived not far from where I live in Chapeltown, which was then home to immigrant families from eastern Europe and Ireland, as it is now for people from the West Indies and other parts of the old British Commonwealth. Kramer wrote that when he was looking at his subject, he saw both its physical appearance and its spiritual manifestation. His struggle, he claimed, was to escape physical appearances and to paint the subject's spiritual form, an idea that was very much of his time, being central to expressionist thinking and deeply influenced by Theosophy. His struggle to find a form of expression that could both elevate the human spirit and remind us of a people's history, give his images a particular authenticity, that can find parallels with Yiadom-Boakye's work. She is also concerned to address a history of a people's representation, or perhaps more accurately their non-representation and in giving form to invented lives, she peoples the walls of the galleries she exhibits in with the portraits that have historically been missing.

As Yiadom-Boakye's portraits are not of any particular person, being constructions made from various source materials, they are anonymous and this opens up their interpretive possibilities.
Many portraits over time lose their associations with particular human beings and by the time we get to see them, the name of who was depicted has long disappeared. But we are still fascinated by the image of a human being, and perhaps once a portrait is unanchored from the particularities of a name, we can much more easily inhabit the image in our imagination.

An Egyptian 'Feyum' portrait of an unknown man

Perhaps the most powerful example of this effect on myself was when first encountering 'Feyum' portraits. They appeared so lifelike, especially as I knew that they were 2,000 years old, their freshness mainly due to their being painted using wax based encaustic techniques, a reminder of the fact that in comparison most contemporary art materials will fade and deteriorate very quickly. I felt I could 'know' these people, that they were alive to me and I was able to give them life stories in my mind. This aspect of historical distancing also operates with Ottovio Leoni's 'Portrait of a Lady' on display in the upstairs gallery; although drawn in the 17th century, I felt she could have just walked into the room. The drawing very subtly draws you into her gaze, the marks constructing it changing, as we move from the gestural impressions that form the outer edges, towards the much more refined drawing of the face. We are in effect, visually sucked in.

Ottovio Leoni: 'Portrait of a Lady'

There are so many comparisons and stories that can be made out of this conjunction of exhibitions, that I find myself drawn back into the gallery at least two or three times a week, each time a new set of relationships suggests itself; a proof to myself of how important free access to art galleries is to the wellbeing of cities. In order to 'see' an image, you often need to go back and look again and then after letting it dwell in your mind, you need to go back and look again. It is such a privilege to have somewhere you can do this, without having to pay an entrance fee. This is an issue that does affect us in Yorkshire, I now rarely go to York Art Gallery where the entrance fee is £8.50 or to the Hepworth where it it £13. We should never therefore take our local gallery for granted.

'To Improvise a Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates' is on exhibition until 5 October 2025.

Sunday, 10 November 2024

Curtis Holder at Leeds City Art Gallery

Seki Lynch, coloured pencil on paper, 150 × 123 cm, 2024

An exhibition of Curtis Holder's drawings, ‘Silent Echoes, Spoken Truths' has opened at Leeds City Art Gallery. Curtis has been an artist in residence at the gallery and the exhibition documents his time in Leeds meeting and drawing people.

On his website Curtis states about the exhibition; "The title of the exhibition reflects the deep – yet often unspoken or overlooked – past histories and emotions of people of the Global Majority in Leeds. It highlights the process of bringing their voices to light with the sharing and revealing of personal stories through dialogue and drawing. "

The sitters for him have also chosen works to accompany the exhibition they felt emotional towards or saw themselves reflected within. I was particularly interested in the exhibition because not only have I followed his work for a while, but one of his 8 sitters is a friend of Sue and myself, so I can get a sense of how as a person someone has been 'captured' by Curtis' work.

As I walked into the main exhibition space I was immediately taken by the portrait of Professor Emily Zobel Marshall. She is an expert on the trickster figure in folklore, and she has also established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform, which I was fascinated by as I am a long term Chapeltown resident, the area of Leeds that hosts a West Indian carnival every summer.

The media Curtis Holder is using is central to how these portraits communicate. His main material choice is coloured pencil on paper and sometimes acrylic gouache is used to give solidity to certain colour areas, drawing therefore being central to his visual thinking.

These drawings although made of thin eel like crayon lines, also feel as if they are woven out of fine threads. The fine lines of crayon colour spread out across the white paper and gradually they find form and as they do so they mass together and as the mass comes into being, the colour range begins to optically blend and what was a quivering network of open lines, gradually becomes a soft mass, a quivering entity that is very slightly out of focus. The process of finding the figure also means that we are given alternative possibilities, hands are in several places, a profile might be suggested and then a more frontal image pursued and pushed further towards a particular identity. Earlier or alternative suggestions are usually made in red crayon, which suggests that all of the images start that way, and indeed there is a red shift in the final colour range. The coloured pencils are kept pretty sharp, and the weight of his hand is such that he can keep that sharpness for a long time, i. e. that he is not pressing very hard, thus allowing his hand to sweep across the paper with a sensitivity to the paper grain. I was reminded of Cézanne's struggle to depict his 'petit sensations' and Curtis Holder I suspect is also fascinated by those small shifts in perception that are constantly happening. If he is to become sensitised to the situation he is looking at, he needs to keep his crayons active, all is therefore rhythmic movement and to capture this, the hand needs to dance with the eyes.

He is.a past winner of 'Portrait Artist of the Year' and I did ask him about some participants use of cameras and iPads, a practice that he also finds very strange, it feels on the one hand disrespectful, the artists rarely looking at their subject and on the other hand, what the artists are doing is making images of images, rather than having to deal with the reality of getting to know another human being over a period of time. Portraits should be about intimate connections and listening to the feeling tone of others, not copying a mechanical image.

Professor Emily Zobel Marshall

It's interesting to look at how Holder's approach is then realised within individual portraits. The portrait of Professor Emily Zobel Marshall is a particularly sensitive combination of the sitter's chosen stance, (hands on hips, staring out into the space she occupies, body very erect and alive with potential) and his application of drawing technique to capture this. Her hair and its interwoven relationship with Holder's approach to the seeking line, became for myself a 'punctum'. (I'm thinking here of Roland Barthes use of the word, whereby he would become attracted to a specific detail in a photograph and this would have a powerful impact on his reaction to the rest of the image.) The fine searching lines of crayon become strands of hair. There is a wonderful synergy between the massing of individual lines and the massing of hair, the one effectively becomes the other, the open energy of the mark making becomes the slightly unruly face framing hairstyle. I am what I am, says both the hair and the crayon mass that represents it. What is then fascinating is how these marks then go on to construct the face.

Rembrandt: Margaretha de Geer

If we look at a Rembrandt portrait, we can see how he treats facial detail, in such a way that we are given a fluidity of emotional engagement, interwoven with a fluidity of paint. Bone structure is clearly in place, but the paint flows over it, in effect therefore forever animating our relationship with the sitter, who is always coming into being, the paint never settling down and therefore remaining alive. The dark space of Rembrandt takes us into an awareness of the sitter's deep psychological inner world, while the interlacing lines of Holder's drawings emerge out of white paper and vibrate with an energy that suggests a more lively inner state, one that in the professor's case is reflected in her stance, suggestive of action, and a confrontation with the light of day, rather than an interiority moving back into the dark.

Background detail: Professor Emily Zobel Marshall

In the space around Emily Zobel Marshall flowers are growing. These echo the ones on her dress, which have been reinforced by the use of acrylic gouache. By being liberated from the dress fabric they appear to grow out of her body, perhaps ghosts of an idea she might once have had. they are made out of the same red crayon lines that she emerges from, an earlier form that like a fossil tells us much about the past. As my gaze flits back to the face, the line of a cheek bone reasserts itself, a sign of a firm skull underneath the soft woven texture of line mass. Her dress has red flower heads painted into the line matrix, this change of media, changing the speed of read, making this fabric more of a holding frame for a body standing proud. Her lips are firm but perhaps, because of the moving lines within which they sit, they are also on the edge of a tremble, after all, the lines of dancing rhythm, like all tricksters, never do quite stand still, they never do create unyielding solids, and as they search the figure out, they perhaps also reveal something of a person's fragility as much as their solidity.

Because I know Doctor Rommi Smith the poet, performer and writer, I wanted to see how Curtis had managed to depict such a dynamic character.

Doctor Rommi Smith

The first thing you notice is that she has many hands. Constantly moving hands create waves of flowing energy around her. In the drawing she has three heads and all revolve around the yellow V of her shirt front, or is it a blouse? Unlike the Emily Zobel Marshall portrait, Rommi's body does not extend down to the bottom of the image, it dissolves in a swirl of marks, as if the waving hands are also breaking her image apart, wiping it away as they gesticulate her thoughts, or try to reinforce an utterance. The hands become like birds about to fly away and have their own independent lives, an idea that could only emerge from a drawing technique that uses marks that flow so fluidly over and through the spaces of the white paper. These intermeshing lines opening out the types of spaces perhaps only seen by birds as they fly through a thick set hedge.

In the portrait of Rommi, arising out of the mazy energy of the crayons' application, there is a strong suggestion of spirituality. This is reinforced by the slightly upwards gazing head, a gaze that looks inwards as much as out. There is a tap on the chest given by the one hand framed in black, a tap that says, "Yes its me, I'm here", the central figure trying to reassure us that she is the one we need to listen to, not those others half formed in the background, not those ghosts of past selves.

In this portrait the punctum for myself was the one line that dropped down from the drawing to touch its bottom edge. A spindly line that the whole drawing is balanced on. Suddenly I became aware that underneath all Rommi's swirling energy, fierce pride and powerful intelligence, there was a thin line that somehow held it all together and that she was more fragile than I had thought.

Rommi Smith: detail

It is Holder's technique that lends itself to these types of narrative. The flickering marks will always suggest a certain fragility, their smoke like haziness can so easily be read with some sort of spiritual implication, but therein lies the fascination of the technique and its need for careful control. The drawer has to finally establish enough coherence within the matrix of lines to convince the audience that some sort of likeness is emerging, not perhaps a fixed likeness, but one that still looks how the sitter appears. This is a likeness as a verb rather than as a noun, a capturing of moments, rather than a moment, which for myself is far more incisive than a photographic copy. It is only in conversation that we get to know someone. In my own work I prioritise conversations as a way to find out what others think and feel, and sometimes these conversations also become portraits, very different in feel and ability to the work of Curtis Holder, but they have given me enough of a similar experience to know how important the one to one experience is to the creation of a necessary empathy if a portrait is to have any real conviction.

Alongside the room of large scale 'finished' portraits which were excellently framed and set off against a wonderful dark blue is a room devoted to Holder's small studies. This room is essential viewing if you are to get a feel for the full range of his ability.

Curtis Holder: Study

I was particularly taken by a small study of a seated man. It reminded me of my old colleague Peter. He has recently had a wonderful exhibition of his photographs, some of which occupied the same space as the drawing I was looking at. Whether it was of him or not doesn't really matter, because the drawing says things about the human condition as a whole, which is why I think Curtis is such an important artist. His drawings go beyond portraiture, they signify something in their very nervous search for truth, that says things about how fragile and yet full of energy life is. The image of a seated man tells us that whoever it was sat for a while had a very particular life force, one expressed through their face, their hands and their body as much as their words. My only reservation about the display was the use of the square magnets, a device that stops holes being put into the paper, but which visually intrudes into the paper space. Such fragile and sensitive marks need to be read unimpeded by any other visual interference. On the other hand it was a brave act to not put these drawings under the cover of perspex sheets and by doing this I really appreciated the close proximity this gave to the act of their making.

The exhibition is open from 08 November, 2024 until 13 April, 2025 and if you can get there don't miss the Stuart Croft exhibition that is on at the same time, the films are extraordinary and deeply thought provoking, this is an excellent time to visit.

Tuesday, 6 September 2022

Charmaine Watkiss at Leeds City Art Gallery

'The Wisdom Tree' is the title of an exhibition of the work of Charmaine Watkiss that is on at the Leeds City Art Gallery. It celebrates the wisdom, strength and resilience of women of African descent and is part of a wider celebration of the contribution of Jamaican culture to society as a whole. Her images are of female guardians, mythic figures that are based partly in Watkiss's personal experiences and partly on more cosmic reflections on spirituality, on a rethinking of history and on a need to find images that celebrate the position of women as both caring humans and as role models for future generations.

The exhibition is centred around three types of drawings. A vitrine houses sketchbooks and drawn studies of certain elements that will become symbols within the more finished drawings, small framed drawings under glass focus on the individual figures that have so far emerged from Watkiss's interests in fusing the individual with the mythic and large drawings attached to the walls by magnets, which are the 'statement' images, that carry the main weight of the ideas by combining the various aspects of her research and bringing them together in single images.

From actual events, such as the 'Windrush scandal' via ancient processes such as alchemy, Watkiss puts together ideas that as an audience you need to unpick as symbolic messages. This is an old practice one that goes back thousands of years and it is one that you can still see around the city of Leeds in the Victorian Quarter. Personification, often using the image of a woman, allows for the representation of abstract qualities in a human form. In the image below from a mosaic in one of the Victorian arcades in Leeds, 'Industry' is symbolised by the hammer that the woman carries.

Leeds Victorian arcade mosaic of 'Industry'

Watkiss however personalises these personifications, these images are understood as individualised women, each one reflecting something of her experience of being a black woman living in a society where Watkiss has at times felt as if she is an outsider. These women are both personifications and persons. Her own culture is where Watkiss derives wisdom, this is where her roots are and in recognising this she is able to stand proud and both accept her heritage and use it as a symbol for a wider need to rethink our collective colonial past.

Large images and a detail

Studies for symbols

Notebooks

Large images hung with magnets

Charmaine Watkiss

This is a small exhibition but it is nevertheless very interesting and well worth going to the City Art Gallery to check out. For myself the most interesting aspect was the raising of individual portraits into personifications. These images reminded me of portraits of Queen Elizabeth the first. They are also personifications, but underneath all that white paint, they are also portraits of an individual woman.

Queen Elizabeth the First of England by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger

Coda

I went to the talk and poetry reading that was given by Charmaine Watkiss alongside the poet and academic Dr. Rommi Smith in relation to this exhibition. This illuminating evening made me very aware of how the arts can cross fertilise each other. Rommi Smith in particular as a poet opens doors into alternative ways of understanding situations that visual artists would perhaps find very hard to do. Listen to her powerfully unravelling her own responses to another art form, Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending here.

Drawing