Month: July 2023

It’s my penultimate drawing day at both galleries and even after almost a year I am still overtaken by nerves prior to starting. What is that about? I know it hampers me, making me self-conscious, stiff and clumsy in both thought and deed. It is almost as if an hour or maybe even two have to pass before my mind and hand coordinate and move in harmony. And I’m doing all this stumbling in public. Agh – why do I do this to myself? Yet even as I write it I know the answer – because sometimes, but only sometimes, something magical comes out of it and I draw in a way that is beyond me.

Ruthin Craft Centre has three new shows – two that are principally ceramics and one textile. I settle my bean bag against a wall and begin. I like trying to capture the text with the artworks as it adds context. I’ve begun to see the pivotal role letters and words play in this gallery and like it. The white walls invite them. And they are designed so elegantly.

The doors open and it’s immediately busy. I overhear conversations, mostly from what I take to be practising or amateur potters, commenting on the processes to each other.

The main show is all about texture. The big pots which I’ve placed myself behind are superb. I love their graffito-ed surfaces and, as I’ve come to find over the last ten months, I almost pray for an empty gallery so that I don’t feel obliged to draw the visitors but concentrate on capturing the work. The curation, as always, is sublime.

These are what I take to be a husband and wife. She does most of the talking, with him pitching in now and again. They do the circuit of the gallery several times. It’s nice to see them so engaged.

There’s a lovely interplay between Matthew Harris’ textile pieces in Gallery 2 and the Natural (Re)Source exhibit in Gallery 1. And there’s lots of reading matter that enables me to draw the readers in the ubquitious hand behind back posture.

And once again I am intrigued as to why it is that it is mostly men who adopt this stance. Is it about containing the extremities of the body? And is it just a Western thing?

Drawing these outlined, empty figures has become a feature of this project. I never intended to do them. But it seems to convey the passing of bodies across the artworks, often indistinct from each other.

Few people talk to me and the ones that do merely ask what I am doing and move on. I tell them about the exhibition next month and they all say they will come. Is it just politeness? A daughter and her elderly mother come in. The mother is deposited on the seat in the middle of the gallery after they’ve both agreed that walking around the space will be too much for her. The daughter sits next to her. They both survey the exhibition. “It’s very nice,” says the mother, her hat still firmly on her head though the sun has come out outside.

This man and his wife also walk around the ceramic exhibits several times, but with this couple he is the one who does the talking. They are evidently planning on purchasing something. “I think this is my second favourite,” he says to his wife, “though would I want it on my window-sill?”

Sometimes there is only time to make a quick line and they are gone.

I can’t work out whether this piece behind the stripped tree trunk is metallic or fibre. I like it and the man leaning almost in sympathy with the white tree is a treat to draw.

I’ve written on Instagram about women and their handbags in galleries, though I’ve seen it more in RCC than in Oriel Davies. Do they feel a little exposed in this space, out of their comfort zones, so to speak? And if that’s the case, is this the reason that these carriers of their known physical life and needs are clutched so tightly?

The owner of this miniature Schnauzer, who he tells me is called Primmy, is one of the few visitors who talk to me today. He holds Primmy still while I try to draw her but thankfully doesn’t ask to see it afterwards.

One of the women on the desk brings over an artist friend of hers to meet me. We talk while her little boy tries to get her attention. Eventually she leans down to him and he whispers something in her ear. “He wants me to tell you that he’s just been to the dentist,” she says.

I arrive at Oriel Davies knowing that there isn’t a show on. I planned to come anyway, saying that I’d draw in the cafe or outside. With the rain outside, the cafe it is.

It’s an impossible window to draw, and yet how can I ignore it since it dominates the space? I sit too comfortably on the sofa, uncertain where to start. I’m a little adrift. I thought I’d enjoy the lack of obvious focus but I don’t. There are no boundaries. I have too much freedom. Help. But draw I must, so I begin by simply following the lines.

It’s nice to see the cafe being used by the people of Newtown. I love this gallery, truly I do – it’s so deliciously egalitarian and unpompous. A woman comes in with two companions. She wears a leopard-print top. They are clearly having a meeting. Are they town councillors?

More drawings of the window. I’m too discombulated to opt for anything more than a pencil.

Another couple come in who appear to know the cafe barista/Manager quite well. Perhaps they are daily regulars.

Deborah pops in to tell me that there’s a work experience girl in the Education Room painting Welsh symbols (or is it flags?) to cut up for bunting and that she’s told her I might go in and draw her. The prospect is not a happy one but I go and have a look anyway. And then I see them.

The posters from a children’s workshop fill the walls, and they are marvellous. What a delight. I plonk myself on the floor and get my crayons out. The work experience girl and I chat and I make an attempt to draw her leaning over the trestle tables but it’s the children’s drawings that captivate me. Oh, to draw as they do… Deborah comes to ask the work experience girl to search for a particular image on Google and tells me that the kids’ workshop theme was Angels and Footballers, a response to the Verrocchio Angel show. “They’ve been up for ages,” she says, “haven’t you seen them before?” I probably have but being too focussed on drawing in the gallery I must’ve overlooked them. I’m sorry for that. They are as good as, if not more so, than many an exhibition I’ve visited – if, the excitation of joy is any measure of good-ness, that is.

I’m growing tired as I always do on these drawings days. I think it’s the anticipation of what they will ask of me that saps my energy. I make a last drawing of the rows of hooks on the Education Room wall, all set at child’s height. Lovely. As is the inclusion of the red fire hose. I’ve come to love gallery paraphernalia…. I shall miss these visits. I’ve learnt so much about art spaces, the relationships that visitors have with them and the art works they show. But mostly I’ve learnt about drawing and how sometimes I don’t want to do anything else. There’s no doubt that it’s become my lifetime’s work, my labour of love.

I’ve loved the Ruthin Craft Centre shows over this last month or so. Their curation and use of space has been terrific. As has their diversity, with the energy and animation of Animal Rites set against the quiet intelligence of Jeanette Orrell’s Indigo Drawing and the elegiac stillness of Zoe Preece’s In Reverence.

In fact I made two visits to RCC in June – one to work with the Animal Rites for a second time and the other because Pete Telfer of Culture Colony was to film me there.

It’s hard enough drawing in public but having a camera trained on you while you are doing so makes it doubly difficult. Somehow I found an inner reserve of courage and bravura and just got on with it, camera or no camera.

Typically the gallery was quiet while the filming was taking place and Gareth from behind the desk had to be roped in as ‘pretend’ visitor. I liked drawing him, and he was stiller than most.

Jeanette Orrell’s drawing is gorgeous: it was a joy to transcribe their marks on paper using ink, crayon, chalk and wax.

Visitors passed like shadows across the painterly surfaces of her hanging textiles.

It fascinates me how each exhibition creates a different spatial narrative and mood. And how in turn the visitors respond to this.

I adore being given permission – as Indigo Drawing gave me – to make free-flowing inky and painterly gestures. And I appear to have developed a habit of making the viewers of these shows into predominantly ghostly outlines. It’s partly to do with the fact that they are moving – in some cases, quite fast – so there isn’t time to draw more than a silhouette. But it’s also about the dominance of (and indeed my interest in) the art on show.

I liked how the pattern on this man’s shirt reflected the organic shapes of Orrell’s work.

My last visit to RCC was to be all about Zoe Preece’s In Reverence. Each of the three galleries has their own ambience and personality. Gallery Two, with its lack of windows and natural light creating a sense of separateness, is darker – more sombre in a way – and colder. Sitting there in the corner on a bean bag it was the shadows that really spoke to me, creating a kind of grey negative space.

With strong resonances of Rachel Whiteread’s inner shapes of houses and objects, Preece’s whiteness – some in piles, and others lifted up and singled-out on shelves – was almost impossible to render.

Visitors mirrored its stillness and hushed restraint in their behaviour. Few people spoke. People peered in, holding their arms close to their bodies. “I long to touch,” said one woman.

The chairs and tables – surprising the whiteness with their warm browness – invited intimacy till one saw that they were exhibits and not for using. I didn’t read about the show’s intended meaning – I rarely do, finding statements tiring – preferring instead to form my own narrative. The domestic ordinariness of the objects, raised as they were to iconic stature, was glorious.

I found it hard to integrate the drawings of the visitors with those of the space. They were two different kinds of discipline – one quiet, almost studious, the other fast and scratchy.

What a lot of women clutching handbags there seemed to be.

Here’s another….

The first drawing I made. I fussed over it. It takes a while to warm up, to find my bravery.

And this one was my last. I was spent, drained. Everything had been packed away except for this one sketchbook and a pencil. She sat down to read the blurb. It was her pumps with their bows that caught my eye and then the contained way she folded her arm across her stomach as she read. Her mien encapsulated the exhibition for me. Reverent? Most certainly.

I was nervous about engaging with Oriel Davies’ new show, the Disability Arts Cymru Prize. It can be tricky to find a focus in a mixed show with no real overarching theme. And, to be honest I find it hard to draw wall-after-wall of small framed 2D artworks.

I was pleasantly surprised. The work was diverse and rich. “Heart-warming,” one visitor said.

But, as with Zoe Preece’s show at RCC, OD’s space dominated my drawings. There was no way round it. The gallery space described and delinated the exhibition – told its story, so to speak. And for me, the chairs set out for visitors along with the labels, the cameras, fire-exit signs and those ‘Borrower-like’ like doors in the panels with their tiny keyholes were all part and parcel of the visual experience.

The flow of bodies visiting the show was a irregular one. And the ones that came moved through the space rapidly.

As with my drawing at RCC, I became so involved with drawing the art and the spaces that contained it that trying to capture the visitors became almost secondary.

I rushed to make a drawing of this man however, as he grabbed one of the gallery chairs so that he could sit and compose a text. It was a long-winded affair with every letter being considered and slowly, painstakingly, typed in.

And then a familiar face turned up. He didn’t recognise me though we’d met twice before and had had long chats. “What are you doing?” he asked. When I explained, he remembered. “Ah,” he said, “I said a bientot last time, didn’t I?”

To iterate, the visitors to the gallery mostly whizzed around the exhibits. These two women however, took their time. The film showing in the semi-boxed in room behind where I was sitting was of particular interest.

A small girl and her mother came in. The girl was carrying a huge toy dog under her arm.

Prior to that an elderly woman had raced in and raced out again wearing full PPE, including a face guard. A large Co-op swung from her arm.

I drew this man in the cafe during a short break. Drawing becomes compulsive, particularly on one of my gallery days. I see things differently afterwards, everything is heightened.

These monthly endeavours are always more rewarding than I envisage, and the nervous energy they expend on them is worth it. Am I getting better? I don’t know. Each time I start I feel like I am back to square one. But I suppose that is the nature of practice, any practice. Till next time then.