I am enjoying Andrew Marr’s “A short book about Drawing” documenting his love of drawing and how it helped him recover following his stroke. Like Marr I agree that “drawing has meaning, it immerses you freshly in the planet you were born on”. When I teach I feel real satisfaction when my students start returning after a few weeks of classes with me to say “I look at everything differently now”. It is only when we start to think about committing what we see to paper that we really take the time to stop and look properly. Otherwise we are often too busy, rushing past the scene, engrossed in conversations and digital communications.
Marr goes on to say drawing “will help you see the hidden patterns all around you, and make you a discriminating lover of landscapes, faces and mundane objects”. He feels drawing “becomes an education and it is about striving to be more fully human”. These are the aspects that underpin my work, both the practise of drawing itself, in which you have to observe and record, and also the act of seeking out the mundane in our daily life and presenting it to the world. Perhaps it is through this act that I help to ground myself in my reality and ask my viewers to look at their daily life in a different way.
In my drawing “Building Site” I was interested in how construction sites make up part of our daily visual experience across so many parts of the country. After a while, we probably walk past without even noticing them anymore, but I like what Marr refers to as the hidden patterns, the strong verticals and horizontals and all the awkward angles. In this drawing I extracted some of the shapes and lines I saw and emphasised them and to me the drawing has a solitary quality that these sites have when empty and abandoned at night.