I’m always surprised by how different each of my visits to Ruthin Craft Centre and to Oriel Davies is. It’s a complex mish-mash of my state of mind at the time, the encounters I have with the visitors and staff, my relationship with the artworks on show and where I choose to sit and view them.
As I’ve said before, RCC’s Gallery 3 is a tricky space to capture on paper, and, indeed, to inhabit. There’s the light from the windows, throwing shadows of grey, sometimes blue, sometimes ochre. There’s the intermittent electronic sliding sound of the automatic door at the far end of the space as people come and go and the fact that it works as a kind of corridor for the larger galleries, often discouraging visitors from remaining. Not so with Antonia Dewhurst’s Gimme Shelter exhibits. They are little jewels of colour, of corrugated detail and impossible to walk past.
The curation is lovely. Sitting on shelves (the artist was in that day and I watched as she tweaked the shelters’ positions, standing back to weigh up each adjustment) the tiny structures appear to float in space. The clean whiteness of the walls and shelves act as a crisp counterpoint to their apparent shabby, ramshackle-ness. They are not. They are exquisitely made.
But, like the space, they are a challenge to depict.
Initially the footfall was slow. Three people eventually arrived and I soon worked out that one was the artist, the other two – a man and a woman – appearing to have a kind of professional relationship, the woman talking about the work to the man as he bent in close or stood back, hand on hips.
Nervous, as I usually am at the start of a day’s drawing, I decided, in an effort to be bold and to counteract this, to use a dip pen. My initial drawings were tentative, scared even, which wasn’t helped by the man and the woman leaning over to watch me. The woman smiled but neither of them said anything. (I later learnt that she was the curator of Dewhurst’s show.)
Providence, it seemed, came to my rescue with the arrival of another man and woman, both of whom were in raptures over the work. Philip, the Gallery Director had said that ‘lots of people were coming today’ including the ex-head of Ceramics at Manchester Met University. It soon became clear that this was him.
It’s such a pleasure to watch people really really look at art. Both he and his companion gave each piece their full attention. Since I was sitting beneath the blow-up of the gallery’s blurb it was necessary for them to acknowledge me as they read.
Asking what I was doing, they showed genuine interest in my drawings, the project and indeed me. “It’s good to see someone drawing,” he said. She agreed and then went on to admire what I’d done so far. (I could’ve hugged her). “Really,” she said, “these are lovely.” I told them I’d studied Illustration at MMU. “I thought so,” she said, “I thought so.”
I observed the two of them from time to time as they wandered around the ceramics show, coming into my view through the doorway that led from Gallery 2 to 3. She took pictures while he leant in, practically breathing the pots in.
Then two women came in, one tall girl in a floral shirt, the other in dungarees and flowery wellies. The floral-shirted woman, a glass-caster, was due to have an exhibition in the space and was checking it out.
Although it was half-term and looking through the window I could see the café was busy, in the gallery it was a day of sporadic visitor flurries followed by quiet.
A few parents and grandparents brought children in, but not many. I saw a man who, though he spoke to some youngsters looking at some photographs of shelters, appeared to be alone. “Are you sketching? ” he asked me, before adding, “I used to be good at art at school.”
He told me that he just been to visit the Car Museum in Denbigh and that he’d seen Christine Keeler’s old Fiesta. We talked as I drew. He was an ex-miner from Rhyl, who’d left the industry after the pit closure to work on the docks – “I had a house and a family to support.” I told him I’d gone to school not far from Rhyl and he said that he’d been in a children’s home nearby. I asked him how old he’d been. “Sixteen, ” he said, “after my mother died of TB.”
He said that he’d come to the gallery on his way home “just to see what’s about.” I thanked him for standing for me, which he’d done so patiently, if a little self-consciously. Apparently content with just conversing, he didn’t ask to see my drawings of him. He smiled at me, inclined his head and left.
Towards the end of my drawing session Antonia Dewhurst and Anna, her curator, returned and asked me about the project. They really engaged with what I was trying to do and I appreciated it. A good, good day.
The anticipation of being filmed while drawing at Oriel Davies heightened my usual pre-drawing day jitters, with that perpetual fear of ‘What if nothing happens?’ or ‘What if my hands won’t or can’t draw?’ increased tenfold. As the filmmaker, Pete Telfer of Culture Colony, mic-ed me up he assured me that he ‘was used to it’, that ‘he’d seen worse’ and that I’d hardly know he was there. He was wrong. I did.
But I was there to draw. So draw I did and with dip pens mostly – my ‘make-it-more-difficult-for-myself-and-therefore-think-less’ default on such occasions.
The gallery was busy and I found myself switching from drawing Clare Curneen’s figures (I was sitting directly behind them) to drawing the visitors. Oh, how I love this show – there’s so much to engage with on so many levels. And I could draw her angels and Philip Eglin’s statues over and over.
The gallery’s busy-ness was mostly down to half-term which brought in gluts of children being ferried their parents into Gallery Three for story-telling, first in Welsh and then in English. I could hear a harp as I drew.
There was also a ‘give-away-a-tree’ event outside the gallery, the first concrete evidence that I’d seen of the Welsh Government’s promise to donate a free tree to every household in Wales.
The angels surveyed the comings and goings with their usual sanguine aplomb. And I just drew. And drew.
Visitors seem to linger at this show, even the passers-by en route to the shops or the bus station. It seems to captivate, to engage a whole demographic.
Two children skitter out from the story telling and stand still just for a moment to stare up at the suspended wingless angel before skipping off.
A little girl in a pink woolly hat with mouse ears stands in front of me, evidently intrigued by what I am doing. “She likes to draw,” says her mother. I ask the girl what she likes to draw. “Witches,” she says. What kind of witches? I ask. “White ones,” she replies, “like my Mummy.”
Two gallery volunteers arrive to take over the afternoon watch. They’re husband and wife. He talks to me as I draw him, telling me of their fascinating life, including a five year period which they both spent teaching English in Kosovo (I think). Laughing to himself, he also told me of the time he stayed in the women’s dormitory in Aberystwyth’s University. “The women weren’t there, I hasten to add,” he said.
Can I admit that I love this kind of drawing? It’s hit and miss, of course, but it stretches me; it’s urgent immediacy means I have to get beyond my destructive mind and just draw, pushing myself to capture the essence of the person before they threaten to move away.
Such was the case with this woman. An illustrator herself, she said that she’d been following my postings on Instagram and was enjoying them. She was carrying two trees in a small plastic bag. “I’ve only a small garden,” she said. She told me one of them was a crab apple.
While he wandered around, his wife, the other volunteer, stood guard over the Verrocchio.
A rather commanding presence, she appeared to both field and answer questions.
Did I hear her tut when a mother removed her child prematurely from the story-telling session because it “was too frightening for him”?
It went OK. And Pete was great. And I drew, which in the end is all I ever want to do.