Drawing on life lessons

The Herald Sun
Monday, August 7, 2006
By Jeff Makin

The old maxim that "drawing is the probity of art", once uttered by the French classicist J.A.D. Ingres in the 18th century, has been said in different ways for thousands of years.

Since man first sought shelter in caves he has drawn. In the cycle of life from womb- to-tomb he draws before he talks-or-walks. And according to Salvador Dali, "drawing is the honesty of art, there is no possibility of cheating, it is either good or bad".

Such assertions are true. And no more pertinent than now, given the serious decline in drawing in most of our art schools.

That drawing provides the bones of painting is undeniable. The reason that there is so much lousy painting around is because the practice of drawing is dying.

John Buckley can see this as well. Long before he became one of our leading art dealers he was an artist (he studied at RMIT 1957-61) and remembers the way drawing was once taught.

Hence, this outstanding survey of drawings in his new Richmond gallery. This is Part 1, and scans the modernist period with over forty drawings. Part 11 is planned for next year and will try to find evidence of drawing amongst the Post-Moderns.

The works in this exhibition tend to fall into three main fields of draftsmanship : life drawing ; compositional studies and imaginative conceptual drawing.

The life drawing studio is traditionally the place where artists were taught to see. The knowledge of anatomy, visual measuring, modelling, negative and positive space is taught in the life room. Such study is represented here in drawings by Donald Friend, Fred Williams, Godfrey Miller and Brett Whiteley.

None of these figure studies are academic.

The Friends are the most perceptual. His fluent pen and ink faithfully follows the contours, cross hatched the shadows, and unlike charcoal doesn't allow for corrections.

The life drawing by Williams in red and black conte pastel follows an approach taught by George Bell, the heel-and-toe technique - the "toe" is the leading edge of the square conte used as a line to quickly define the edge of form, and the "heel" the butt or side of the crayon used to block-in the masses of shadow.

Miller on the other hand focused on the linear structure of the figure almost as a formal engineering problem.

Three early studies of copulating lovers by Brett Whiteley illustrate a looser less perceptual approach. His searching line lives on the existential edge of an act experienced, rather than simply observed, hence the slightly impassioned nature of his stroke.

Drawing for composition, with a painting in mind, is seen in the untitled perceptual study of a ship anchored in a harbour by Lloyd Rees from 1932. It's in pencil on hot-press paper (what was sometimes known as Ivory Board) chosen for it's extreme smoothness that unlike a grainy paper offers no resistance to the graphite pencil, hence Rees's great clarity of technique.

Another example of this can be seen in the tri-figure study by Russell Drysdale. It's a group reminiscent of many in his paintings of the outback. His is a searching line that describes facial identity, clothing, and that relaxed leaning manner that bushies often have.

Drawing thinking about a painting is again evident in another Williams, a 1963 You Yangs study. Here the trees, fences and roads of the volcanic plain leading to Corio Bay, seen from Flinder's Peak, are reduced down to a few flicks of pastel that later became some of his most elegant paintings.

Lloyd Rees, Untitled 1932, Pencil on paper

Drawing as invention, making the invisible visable, as Oscar Wilde once described it, can be seen in the works by James Gleeson, Paul Boston and Gareth Sansom.

Gleeson like our afore quoted Dali is a Surrealist. In their hands drawing becomes biographer of a biomorphic dreamscape, in Gleeson's case often called "psychoscapes". The form in this drawing, Biomorph 1980, takes on a glazed visceral appearance. Whereas Boston refers to an everyday object in his Boot Creature, reinvents it, and centralises it in a circuitous charcoaled parkland of Boston-isms.

The Sansom is perhaps the only genuine drawing as diary entry in this survey. It is an episodic piece. Pages from a sketch book assembled together cover some of his favourite subjects such as cross-dressing, eroticism, heroes, and social commentary all penned-in with typically irreverent verve.

Sculptors usually draw three-dimensionally, but a pair of white-on-black cooing birds by Bruce Armstrong have strong graphic presence.

Drawings in European and American collections are highly prized as the first unique visualisation of creativity. Their sidelining in Australia is curious. Certainly the art schools are partly to blame. But there is also this other phenomena, the current art boom, name-or-frame mentality that buys big and flashy. It's a new money no-knowledge thing. Hence it may take some time before we see drawing move back to centre stage where it rightly belongs.