Roy Oxlade, Rose Wylie and raw image making

Roy Oxlade

Oxlade's images are odd, funny, sensual, absurd and visceral. He didn't like French art  "The problem with French painting," he wrote, "is it all seems a bit Montmartre." I.e. it had become mannered and he was always in a battle with what he thought of as English insipidness. 

It is very hard to make a surprising image, the older you get and the more practiced and knowledgeable the easier it is to slip into tried and tested ways of making images. It is very hard to continually surprise yourself, but Oxlade in many ways achieved this and in doing so left a powerful legacy to those coming after him. Hopefully this is not a legacy in terms of how things look, or a style, but is a way of ensuring that art and life don't become separated. Life is surprising, odd, funny, horrible, tragic and visceral, is chaotic in nature and of infinite complexity and so why shouldn't art be the same? We have all at one time or another burnt the toast and thrown it in a bin, but how many of us have thought that it might be worth a drawing? 

One of the best responses an image can have from an audience is, "That's daft", words that for me mean that something has happened to raise a question in someone's mind about the nature of reality. It might also be funny. Never under estimate the power of humour. 

Roy Oxlade 

Objects can be very funny, look at those domesticated thingies that hang around the kitchen, what do they talk about to each other when you are out? How do they appear to each other, what is the kitchen pecking order? Who knows? But it might be worth a drawing to find out.  

Roy Oxlade: The Yellow Lamp

On some days the light source is more lively than the model. Who has never gazed at the angle-poise lamp with admiration. Pixar have branded themselves with it. Oxlade I suspect surprised himself when he made the image above, an image that is indeed, 'daft'. 

Rose Wylie lived with Oxlade for most of his life and painted her own surprising images that in many ways surprise us even more than his. 

Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie still continues to paint and as she does so, she seems to be able to tap directly into scenes from her childhood and a freshness of vision that is childlike. (Not childish, I hasten to say). Some of her images are very large and it feels as if the very struggle to work on such a large scale is part of the awkwardness of the images, an awkwardness that is part and parcel of why they feel powerful and direct. However, Wylie like Oxlade can also become trapped in that loop that can catch any of us out. As you search for a childlike or raw vision it can become a style, and as the policeman said to the art student, "Remember style is the enemy of all art". 

I saw some drawings by Nadine Fienson not long ago from her 'Sex Toy’ series. They had a freshness that suggested that she was trying to tap into things she was still finding awkward and difficult, like life. 

Nadine Fienson ‘Revenge of the Sex Doll’

Nadine Fienson

I hope that Nadine was as surprised by her imagery's arrival as I believe Oxlade was. It felt like that to me, but that's perhaps because I'm also aware of her sophisticated ability to handle paint. 

Pig Sticker

Nadine Fienson 'The matriarch' 

Surprising yourself with imagery is also about allowing it to emerge by itself and sort of catching if off guard. It's a lot harder than it seems, which is why so many artists end up getting fed up with themselves. What they are annoyed at is their own fear of letting go. I still have that problem. I can sometimes look at what I have been doing and realise that I'm making parodies of my former self and when I do I need to stop, walk away and begin again. Some artists look for a style, my feeling is that as soon as you have found it you need to lose it. Having a style suggests that you are more important than the world around you, but reality is far more important than any one individual and it has no style. Style also suggests that things are predictable, and as we well know, life is not like that. 

See also:

Josh Armitage

Louis Soutter

Images of the city (includes some thoughts on Bomberg, Auerbach and Creffield) 

More on life drawing and David Bomberg's influence

There is a link to Rose Wylie at the end of this post on colour, she lived and worked alongside Roy Oxlade for many years.

An on line exhibition catalogue of Roy Oxlade's work 

The Uncertain Certainty

Drawings of flowers have a deep connection to what are usually called 'vanitas' or 'memento mori' images. These images were designed to remind the viewer of their own mortality and of the worthlessness of worldly goods and pleasures. However it is not only the subject matter that can operate in this way, the actual approach to making an image can open out a meditation on the fragile relationship between the physicality of the world and the fleeting moment of its perception. 

Leonard McComb

There is a particular approach to drawing that I always warm to, it's what I would call an 'uncertain certainty'. Some of the artists that I go back and look at over and over again have this quality, which is about time and touch, as well as about the interrelationship between mass and space, or if you want to get more religious about it, the spirit and the body. 
The best of Leonard McComb's drawings have it. An almost spiritual radiance emanates from his drawings of flowers. It's as if he is trying to touch the petals with his eyes, each mark a caress of direction and an attempt to feel around the mass. He builds these drawings up with small directional marks, marks that at their inception appear to be looking for the form, but as they build up, they energise the space, eventually space and mass interpenetrate, all now vibration.  

This drawing of a fish seems to capture both its material condition and the moment that it's iridescence makes it become as transient as a soap bubble. It is indeed a 'memento mori'.

Leonard McComb

The historical precedence for these drawings is once again Cezanne, in particular the late watercolours.

Cezanne

David Jones is another artist that developed a body of work using a similar tentative and yet sure touch that feels as if he is delicately searching for the rhythms that lie underneath what we see. 

David Jones

It's interesting to compare artists working in this way to someone using a similar subject matter, Graham Crowley's flowers are a composition of solids, specks of white oil paint dot over the charcoal drawing, giving a superficial appearance of spatial opening, but when you look beneath the surface, each flowerhead is in fact seen as a mass, it's just that there are so many of them that their sheer number activate the surface and create a spatial rhythm.  Mass in action, rather than mass turning into energy. A sort of dark flower power.

Graham Crowley

If you look at Claude Heath's drawings of a head by touch, there is also an uncertain certainty, which also relates to the idea of vision as a sort of feeling or touch. 

Claude Heath

Michelangelo had a wonderful sense of touch, and was also a master of that uncertain certainty. The difference is that this is not a drawing done from observation, it is done by someone searching for an image. The search itself is attempting to carve the image out of the paper, each mark chisel like, the body gradually dissolving into energy, the mass becoming spirit. 

Michelangelo

Adriaen van Ultrecht

The painting above by Adriaen van Ultrecht, exemplifies many of the traditional conventions of 'vanitas' painting. The skull, the flowers, a closed book etc., this still-life (in French: nature morte) is designed in such a way that our gaze is focused on the moment of frozen perception, the glint of light on a glass, the texture of a fallen petal, or the crumple of paper. The artist holds us in the moment, but the surfaces of these objects are what they are about. The interaction of looking, the oscillation of the eyes is not recorded, life is not captured, only the objects' surface appearance. I could argue that the painting is 'without life', hermetically sealed and 'finished'. Whilst the more uncertain images further above are open to life, forever emerging into being, and as such a much deeper metaphor and one that goes beyond a Capitalist fascination with objects and things. When Adriaen van Ultrecht painted his image, the Low Countries were central to the development of world trade as we now know it, and we often see images of things constructed during this time as measures against which metaphors for the condition of our lives could be constructed. People become measured by their possessions. A condition that still in many ways persists, one which I would argue against and suggest that we need to be more aware of the flux and flow of interrelationships between the world and ourselves, and consider how what we do impacts upon the world; which is why I am drawn so strongly to that uncertain certainty; something you can never own, only meditate upon. 

Brass shell-case, with flowers

In my own work I have occasionally needed to reflect on things in such a way that I need use a visual language that supports the struggle to 'see' an idea. In the case of the drawing above, it is of a shell case that my grandfather brought back from the First World War, it is now used as a flower vase. As in Adriaen van Ultrecht's painting flowers are used as a symbol of mortality, their conjunction with the shell-case suggesting the explosive release of the shell from the gun barrel as well as those moments in history when flowers have been used to spike the guns. It is though in the tentative marks used that the real story lies. 

See also:

The uncertainty principle is also an issue that raises its head when thinking about quantum mechanics see these posts:

Drawing and Quantum mechanics part one

Drawing and Quantum mechanics part two

Abstraction and mathematics an attempt to describe a quantum flux as drawing theory

The hard won image

Celia Paul and Cezanne

Thoughts on life drawing

Trench art

Josh Armitage

Josh Armitage is the new artist in residence at the centre for recent drawing. See
He is in residence 15 - 29 January 2016 and there will be a reception 6-8pm on the 29th of January if anyone happens to be in London and wants to see how things are progressing.

This is the C4RD statement about his work:

'Josh Armitage's practice has a firm foundation in drawing and animation, expanding over the last two years to include painting. It is Josh's intention during the residency to make a series of large-scale drawings and use this as the basis for his work throughout 2016.

Armitage is influenced by the ideas of artists Henri Matisse, David Bomberg and Roy Oxlade. When drawing, he says his aim is to discover something new. The discovery might be the drawing itself, marks within the drawing, shapes, textures or an idea brought forward by seeing the drawing. If he were to have a complete idea of a drawing in his mind and complete control while he produced it, then for Armitage would be nothing left to discover. Observation allows Armitage to overcome this problem; allowing observation, the observed subject and the process of drawing as integral to the generation of the drawing'.

As always I'm interested in how drawings arrive and so this sentence in particular caught my eye, 'the observed subject and the process of drawing as integral to the generation of the drawing'.

Below are some drawings done on the residency.

There is a straightforward simple exuberance about these drawings that remind me of how enjoyable just making a set of marks in response to what happens to be in front of you can be. Step ladders are always good to draw they exist as a 3D beginning of a grid, as soon as you begin to draw them they start to make interesting structures. You can see Roy Oxlade's influence, Armitage is prepared to just let the marks and lines happen and isn't worried if a mark looks 'child-like', in fact he celebrates the  freshness of any drawing that appears to just arrive out of thin air with a 'rightness'. I would suggest that perhaps the yellow stepladder is closest to Oxalate's temperament, and Armitage has left this alone, obviously feeling that as an image it makes enough of a statement. Compare Armitage's drawings with Oxlade's below. 

Roy Oxlade

The drawings of David Bomberg and Roy Oxlade point to a fascinating but short lived moment of English art education. Oxlade was briefly a student of David Bomberg and therefore he would have been very aware of Bomberg's teachings and the idea of the 'spirit in the mass'. Bomberg had developed a situation around which a small group of artists were drawn, all of which were facinated by the fact that “there is no finality to any form ultimately – everything we see, touch, or know, can always be something else.” This constant re-engagement with looking was at the core of what Bomberg was looking for. Each and every time a drawing was made it was a re-discovery of what it was to look and at the core of this process was a discovery of how something was seen in time. This was 'the spirit in the mass'. Bomberg was very influential on a whole range of British artists, in particular artists who were centred on how to record the awareness of the perceptual dance associated with looking at the world. Cliff Holden, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and Dennis Creffield were all members of what was then known as the Borough Group. (This was in the late 1940s early 1950s).
It's interesting to see that this tradition is still seen as a worthwhile pursuit. For some time more conceptual approaches to drawing have held sway, but I have recently seen a return to 'looking' and perpetual questioning. Of course all looking is to some extent conceptual and even the most cool conceptual work involves perception, so there are no hard lines between the two approaches, but the balance shifts and perhaps each time a concept is revisited, something new is brought to the table.  In Armitage's case I would suggest there is more of an awareness of performative approaches. Drawing as both a performance and as a record or documentary of performance action has been of much interest over the last few years and artists currently practicing are therefore, even if not themselves overtly dealing with performance, aware that contemporary audiences 'reading' drawings, often take performative issues into account. 

Centre For Recent Drawing
2-4 Highbury Station Rd LONDON N1 1SB
www.c4rd.org.uk

See also these earlier posts
Denis Creffield
Life drawing

Rose Wiley and Roy Oxlade