On Drawing

‘Technically I didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water as it wasn’t in the bath at the time’ (2020) by Ray Ward

The verb​ ‘to draw’ refers to an act of pulling. Apply it to mark making, and two such acts come into view. A hand pulls a marker across a surface. Human intention, on some level or other, is involved. But the vessels of that intention – our minds, our quickened muscles – are themselves pulled along. While engaged in drawing, we are aware that there is something yet to be brought into sight, some impact on the surface that is yet to be delivered. As long as the activity lasts, there are lures ahead: objects of vision, whether ‘in here’ or ‘out there’, impulses to animate and to amend. The experience is less of being in command than of being in pursuit.

Once the hand leaves off, the marked surface may serve as a step in an inquiry or at least a historical record. We discard the sensation that originally held us gripped. Reversing that drift, the exhibition Drawing the Unspeakable at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne (until 27 April) points us back to mark making’s lived intensity. By its very title, this capacious, overwhelming array – of work mostly but not exclusively from the past hundred years and from Britain – suspends definition of what’s pursued. Faces, families, phantasms, memories, stories, satirical indictments, landscapes, sheer traces of the moving hand: the subjects offered to sight at the Towner are radically various. But the artist Liza Dimbleby, curating, has sought out a unifying key. The exhibiting artists are, she argues, ‘reacting to the experience of being a body in the world’. The guiding principle is broadly psychoanalytic. Drawers feel themselves pulled because somatic irritations of various magnitudes – thwarted energies, traumas, socially imposed constraints – lie just beyond the conscious mind’s full grasp.

It’s fitting that the show’s poster art is from Ken Kiff. Twenty-four years on from his death, Kiff’s charcoals, dredging seas of dreams for archetypal wreckage or treasure, snag sharply; one haul, revealing a female murderer thrilled to discover she has grown giant arms, provoked Dimbleby into debate with her co-curator father, David. (Printed scrolls of their exchanges dangle between gallery bays.) Artist: ‘It’s what I feel like when I start drawing after a long period of not being able to draw.’ Broadcaster: ‘But that’s just your feminism, feminist propaganda … Why do we have no drawings expressing joy and exuberance and happiness?’ Artist: ‘I think Ken Kiff’s drawings are quite exuberant.’

You could arm-wrestle like this over a tablecloth-sized sheet worked in graphite in 2011 by Margarita Gluzberg. To-and-fro, up-or-down freehand scorings traverse its expanse in a seemingly continuous fury, lines leaping from one impacted cloud to another as a great block of darkness coagulates. An aggressive weight on the eye, and at the same time, a virtuosic dance of victory. It turns out that an ‘out there’ informed the apparent abstraction – sequences from Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, tracked by Gluzberg’s crayon as she projected them onto the paper. But whatever she traced cannot be retraced. This show foregrounds drawing that ends up in unforeseen places, by drawers who do not fully know themselves.

With drawing, as with singing, muscular tremor is the surest yardstick, indicating how someone is grasping the form they have to articulate, how homely or strange it may be to them – in effect, acting as a register of their personal sincerity. Kiff and Gluzberg are each in their way sincere. They also both play to the gallery. Their performances pack rectangles strategically: these sheets know themselves to be exhibits. There is implicitly a tension here. Pigment could interrupt blank paper just anywhere, as attention lights up in the free space of the mind: such solitary flares are in a sense what this show salutes. But it does so chiefly through composed, frame-conscious ‘presentation’ pieces. The grouped works that along with Kiff’s dominate the sprawling display – suites by Ansel Krut, Andrzej Jackowski and Peter de Francia – are operations in which rectangles have been subdivided and the components (in each case featuring human figures) made to jostle and jangle. These artists, too, make intuitive forays, but with them the pursuit turns in on itself, facing some intractable knot at the heart of things.

In these ventures of the recent past, we see drawers groping bewildered under spotlights on a stage. Was it always so? How far are Dimbleby’s artists removed from the studio bosses wielding metal points and red chalk whose works in the Royal Collection were recently on show in Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King’s Gallery? In The Story of Drawing (Yale, £25), Susan Owens surveys marks set down from the palaeolithic to the present. Obliged by the publisher’s picture limit to select impressionistically, Owens alights on many a wonder: beside the canonical must-haves of museum cabinets, we are introduced to the figure-packed caprices adorning the ninth-century Utrecht Psalter, ‘as strange and fractured as a half-remembered dream’, and to the artist David Connearn standing before a sheet across which he freehand pulls a Rotring from left to right – line below line below line – as far as the arm will reach, ‘a method both humble and profound’. (These diminutive illustrations tantalise. Here is yet another octavo art book that would be friendly to the hand, were it not that your fingers need to stray to Google Images for more.)

Owens has wide sympathies and a joyful way with a paragraph. In particular, as a former curator at the V&A, she takes a gourmet’s pleasure in the materials of drawing (Seurat’s handmade paper with its ‘distinct “tooth”, as bumpy as an orange skin’) and rounds off her text with a glossary that is at once punctilious and delectable. She also tells winning anecdotes, whether about Huang Xiangjian trekking in 1650s Yunnan or Berthe Morisot picnicking in 1870s Picardy. What she doesn’t tell is the ‘story’ that her title promises, still less an ‘alternative history of art’, as her subtitle has it. Facile connective phrasings – ‘drawing revolved around faith’ is the bridge from neolithic geoglyphs to monastic parchments, with classical antiquity leaped over – make me suspect that drawing simply offers little traction for a memorable narrative. In this, it stands in contrast to painting, that emphatically public practice with its so often recounted about-turns.

Some themes, perhaps, resist temporal shaping. (The absurdist Vivian Stanshall once hypothesised A Pictorial History of Gargling.) The moment at which the marked sheet morphs from functional investigation to aesthetic collectible is, to judge from Owens’s text, endlessly repeated. Even at their most intimate and speculative, the King’s Gallery masters – Leonardo chasing a cat at play, Polidoro da Caravaggio studying the head of a Doubting Thomas from a hand’s-breadth distance – had entourages to impress and to whom we owe the sheets’ preservation.

The difference I chiefly sense is that artists working then would have been buoyed by the camaraderie of busy workshops. They swaggered and contended, but with prevalent good cheer. Fly from Renaissance Italy to modern Britain and you descend into cloud banks of isolation and melancholy. Not exactly disabling depression: new graphic initiatives abound, reaffirming Owens’s claim that ‘drawing is democracy.’ But Dimbleby Sr’s complaint holds good: hardly anything here feels carefree. You walk away from the Towner seared by sombre images. Denzil Forrester imagines the death of a friend in the back of a police van, Ghislaine Howard tackles the throes of childbirth and Laura Footes those of Crohn’s disease. A house by John Davies bursts with eerie, ghostly flames. The gallery door closes and the dark world outside looks darker. Ray Ward made me laugh, however. His ink drawings, bending round pasted-together eggboxes and plastic cartons to conjure up little merry-go-rounds of disoriented town-dwellers, have domestic overheards for their titles. Technically I didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water as it wasn’t in the bath at the time and Daddy not milk and sparkling water again.