I’ve called this blog ‘I draw’ because my art-work is centred on Drawing.
I am an artist from Margate.
I’ve called this blog ‘I draw’ because my art-work is centred on Drawing.
I am an artist from Margate.
A short video tour of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize exhibition.
My silverpoint drawing, ‘Displaced Portrait No19 (Dezember 1919)’, has been selected for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.
Here is a brief video tour of the exhibition (please click on the link above):
I’ve been awarded the First Prize in the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Portrait Prize exhibition (sponsored by the GMC Trust). I couldn’t make along to the opening because of the train strike, and I missed the telephone call to let me know that I’d won, and so it came as a lovely surprise to me. My piece is called ‘Mum’ and it’s a small silver and goldpoint drawing on gesso on board.
Here is it a description of the work used for the exhibition: “The starting point for this portrait is a tiny identity-card image of the artist’s mother. It has been endlessly re-drawn, over the course of a few years, in silver and goldpoint, and with needles, scalpel blades and sandpaper. The hope is always to get at something which feels true. Lines of hand-written text also form part of the piece. The repeatedly re-written lines of remembered speech are, as with the drawing of the face, drawn, scratched-away and re-drawn again and again. Only fragments and glimpses remain. Metalpoint lines leave an indelible but ever so slight trace; pressing the point harder will not make the lines any more strongly present. This is a drawing as a kind of meditation on human presence and memory.”
The piece has been worked on over the course of a few years and on sixty-eight separate days (I keep a note of the number of days’ work on the back of the drawings). I don’t think my drawings are ever really finished, though. I often re-work my drawings after they’ve been exhibited, and it’s often the case that my drawings are eventually destroyed by the re-working. An earlier incarnation of this piece was shown in an online exhibition at Anima-Mundi Gallery (St Ives), but it’s a subtly different drawing to how it was then. Seeing the piece in the real world is a very different experience to seeing an image of the piece. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but I think you really need to be in company with this drawing, and to spend time with it, to ‘get it’. If you can make it along to the RBSA Gallery, then please do go and have a look.
The exhibition’s selectors were Jenny Page (Director of The Barber Institute of Fine Arts), Marta Kochanek (award winning photography artist) and John Devane RBSA (Professor of Painting at Centre of Arts, Memories and Communications, Coventry University).
A big thank you to the people at the RBSA Gallery, the selectors, the GMC Trust and to the people who came to listen to me talk about my work at the gallery a few weeks ago.
I’ve posted a short video tour of the exhibition over on my YouTube channel. It’s just a very brief glimpse of the work in show, and I realise I missed out some of my own favourites, but it gives a good impression of the show.
The RBSA Gallery is in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham City Centre, just a short walk from ‘Pigeon Park’ and very near to the wonderful St Paul’s Church.
There is an illustrated catalogue to go along with the exhibition which you can buy from the gallery shop.
Thanks!
I did a Zoom talk about Drawing last week. It’s been uploaded to YouTube. It was part of a series of online talks for Draw Brighton’s ‘ETC’ series of talks/conversations with the Artist and writer Jake Spicer. I’ve watched it a couple of times now and I can’t help but cringe at the sound of my own voice (this seems to be a common reaction to hearing one’s own voice on a recording). Listening to it just now, I can see where I can improve things for future online talks (talk more slowly and use far fewer images), but I think that overall, it’s not too bad and I did manage to put across quite a few interesting ideas about Drawing.
And so [cue drum roll], here is the videorecording of my talk about Drawing for Draw Brighton’s ‘ETC’ series of talks.
ETC: Roy Eastland (youtube.com)
I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve been in the grip of what is often called ‘Creative Block’ for a long time. It’s miserable and it’s boring. In spite of it, I continue to draw and I continue to teach Drawing and to believe in Drawing as a serious Art form. My ‘creative block’ takes the form of a kind of dull feeling of “What’s the point?”. I have faith in what I’ve already drawn, but it’s knowing what to do next is where the problems are. I think it might be a kind of Depression.
A quick trawl through YouTube will yield a whole load of videos with annoyingly over-emphatic people spouting their cheerful solutions for when you lack “inspiration”. But in my case, my periods of creative block have never taken the form of a lack of ‘inspiration’ or lack of ideas. Perhaps I should say that ‘creative block’ is an ever-present given but that sometimes it gets the better of me. And like many others, from working class backgrounds who work in The Arts, I experience what is sometimes referred to as ‘impostor syndrome’. My hunch is that any Artist who doesn’t lack confidence probably isn’t trying hard enough or taking their Art seriously enough.
It’s hard to know what the causes of my own creative block are. I’ve no doubt it has a lot to do with my particular personality traits and lots to do with childhood. I’ve no doubt that the parts of my personality which drive me to make works of Art are those same parts which cause me to have such powerful doubts. But it’s also the case that uncertainties about income and my deep and long-term worries about having a home play a part too. Living in a place like Thanet, with its ‘Cultural Regeneration’, doesn’t help matters either. There will be many contributing factors and I don’t believe for a moment that there is ever any straight forward cause-and-effect when it comes to ‘Creative Block’.
I’m choosing to believe that my ‘creative block’ is all part of a process of change and that this change is taking place on subconscious levels as much as anything else. Whatever comes next is a ghostly thing that can’t be forced into being: it must be allowed to take its own time and form.
For the time being, the practice of Life Drawing, along with my teaching practice, is keeping me in touch with Drawing. I’m dropping out of life ever so slightly. I’m letting things slide. I’m trying not to worry. It’s my tactical and a strategic withdrawal in order to re-group and then re-engage. And as with Drawing, we never know what comes next. We’ll see.
If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment below and/or go to my other Drawing blog (https://royeastland.wordpress.com) where you can join in with the discussion there.
I presently have work included in the Anima-Mundi gallery’s online exhibition, “Thresholds (The Unnamed)” and in the Turner Contemporary Open exhibition.
I’m very pleased to find that my drawing, ‘Displaced Portrait No15 (woman with baby)’ will be included in the Turner Contemporary Open exhibition later this year.
This piece is one of an ongoing series of silverpoint drawings based on souvenir and identity photographs taken mostly in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and which I have found at different times in the same second-hand shop in Margate (my home town). The original photograph is a snapshot-trace of the look of a moment. My drawings are a kind of meditation on these displaced traces of moments in lives.
There are any number of reasons why a person’s image might find its way into a second-hand shop. I know nothing about this particular woman or the baby. But I can assume that she was German because she appears in another photograph, dated to New Year 1940, in which she is part of a happy-looking family group which includes men dressed in Wehrmacht uniforms.
My drawings take time. They emerge over the course of months, and sometimes years, of painstaking rounds of re-drawing. They are repeatedly scratched-away and redrawn with points of silver, needles, scalpel blades and sandpaper. Each re-working is a chance to see something new. My drawings are never just hand-made copies of photographs. Through repeated redrawing, I hope to bring something to the surface which I could not have foreseen.
I wonder who have I drawn here?
The ‘Turner Contemporary Open’ runs from October 2021 until February 2022.