After over a year of ‘practising’, my Arts Council Wales funded reportage drawing project Gwylio’r Gwylwr/Gallery Watching began in earnest last month with consecutive visits to my host galleries – Ruthin Craft Centre and Oriel Davies, Newtown.
The project sprang from a desire to pare down my art practice and find a more authentic, spontaneous and reactive way of working. A writer and reviewer in my other life, galleries and the human behaviour they excite, have always fascinated me. As a result, I have frequently used such spaces as sites for my installation and performance work. Harking back to an Illustration degree that I took in the 1990s, I have always been intrigued by reportage drawing (Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello in their superlative book Reportage Illustration, define it as: ‘capturing the dynamics of unfolding events…..sketching the appearance of a scene as well as striving to understand and communicate a story through visual language‘). I adore its immediacy and that kind of make-or-break experience of drawing.
Though in awe of reportage artists both living and dead (such as Ronald Searle, Mervyn Peake, George Butler, Audrey Hawkins and Veronica Lawlor) who choose to cover difficult and often harrowing political events, my oeuvre is a more benign one. I just love to watch people – and what better place to do that than in art gallery?
Nevertheless, however I do it, drawing, or at least the public performance of drawing, still petrifies me. (It was somewhat consoling to read that the great Paul Hogarth also used to get nervous before beginning a reportage commission.)
Ruthin (RCC) was my first port of call. A somewhat intimidating space at the best of times – with its wide open-ness, bright light and with no real hidden nooks or crannies in which to secrete myself – I felt like I was on stage, exposed and nervously awaiting my audience.
A couple from Sunderland, clearly entranced by Neil Wilkin & Rachael Woodman’s glass show, were my first ‘models’ (or should I say ‘victims’?). They asked what I was doing and we had a long conversation about glass (when I should’ve been drawing). Next there was a woman from Holland. “I’m an illustrator,” she said, adding, “If you draw me I’ll buy it.” (I did draw her while she was leaning at a perfect right-angle looking at a Jenni Moncur carpet, but didn’t show it to her.)
It was the day after the Queen’s funeral, so it wasn’t surprising that it was pretty quiet, but at least the flow of visitors was constant. (From the experience of ‘practising’ in coffee shops, where I draw the queue, I find I need this flow in order to maintain an energy of both hand and mind. And so that I don’t have time to think too much (!).
Nerves made my penmanship (and decision-making) slow and stiff. I hadn’t really noticed how fast some people move around gallery spaces, particularly men for some reason. And in RCC there’s that distance to deal with, but needing to sit and have all my drawing paraphernalia around me makes me static (when I long to get up and walk around). How do those professional reportage artists manage, I found myself thinking more than once? Harry Morgan straps a drawing board round his neck and walks as he draws, but most, like me, choose to sit. Planning and refining the drawing materials you intend to use beforehand seems to be the answer – though I’ve yet to get this off to a fine art, particularly when the galleries (and a lot of their visitors) exude such colour.
Later, I watched an elderly lady pushing a walker circumnavigating the galleries at an extreme speed, so much so that I thought she would collide with me. “So they still teach drawing in art schools, do they?” she said, brusquely. I tried to explain that I wasn’t a student and hadn’t been for some years but she’d moved on.
But for all my initial frustration with my line (being at the mercy of recalcitrant dip pens) and slow mental responsiveness, there were some real ‘gifts’ – such as the arrival of a group of women – all wearing black – who toured around the gallery spaces several times and provided me with some real energetic drawings. Thank you RCC – in the end it was a real joy.
The next day I went to Oriel Davies (OD).
OD is a very different space to conjure with; it’s smaller and by nature a little more intimate but I am still on show and in some ways more so. And the visitors can’t hide from me either.
The morning was quiet and I spent some time looking at and drawing Shani Rhys James’ and Stephen West’s paintings and drawings, prompting one man (I’d watched him visit each work and study them carefully) to ask: “Why are you painting the paintings?”
And what a treasure he turned out to be. An ex-lecturer and an artist himself we entered into a fascinating conversation about art (“I call myself an artisan”), the pros and cons of dip pens (“You should use a fountain pen”) and the closure of city centre galleries. And best of all he let me draw him as he talked.
It was exhilarating.
People seemed more willing, or perhaps more comfortable, engaging with me in OD. I’m not sure why. Some asked me if I was Shani Rhys James herself. Others were just curious about what I was doing.
The range of visitors was fascinating. A couple joined another woman who’d been talking to me, telling her (and me) that they just come from teaching Welsh poetry via a harp at a primary school nearby. And then two police officers came in, in full uniform. The man was particularly fastidious, stopping in front of each and every art work to look and ingest. His female companion did rather a lot of giggling (whether at him or the art it was hard to say). Later a young woman leading an elderly man by the arm came in. “Let’s just choose which one you like best, ” she said. He didn’t raise his head once.
I relish the different experiences the galleries offer me – both by the nature of the spaces and the demographic of visitors. And sometimes just being there – given permission to just sit and observe (amid all that glorious colour) – was enough. So thank you OD, I had a marvellous day.
