This is a small, metalpoint-on-gesso, drawing of a tiny photograph I found in a second hand shop in Margate. The photograph, which has ‘Neujahr 1940’ written on the back of it, is about 6cm x 9cm and my drawing is about A5 in size. This drawing hasn’t been worked on for a while. It has been through a number of reworkings and it’s not at the stage I would be happy to present it as a work of art yet. It was (still is) intended as one of a series of drawings of people in Margate, or of people with some connection with Margate, wearing costumes or uniforms of some kind (a previous blog post about a drawing of a group of people in fancy dress, from the 1930s, is also one of this series of drawings). This particular work might be picked up again in the future but for now this drawing, as well as the others, are resting. The connecting themes with all of these are the themes of ‘identity’ and ‘place’ (specifically Margate) and the connections between people and places and bigger world events. Primarily, my drawings are about people.
These works are part of an ongoing series of drawing based on photo booth images of people. These people happen to be my mum and my dad, but the fact they are of my mum and dad is only really of interest to me. They are drawings of people whose image was captured in automatic photo booth pictures (the old kind, from the 1970s and 1980s, when there would be a sequence of four images and the least bad of them was used for the bus pass or whatever). They record little self-conscious moments which no one else saw at the time.
These drawings of these tiny images are about 7cm x 9cm in size and they are drawn on gesso-covered boards of roughly A5 dimensions. The medium is metalpoint (specifically silverpoint). This is literally drawing with a point of metal on a prepared surface. It’s a medium which is most commonly associated with Early Renaissance artists of Florence and Umbria but I use the medium in different way to that of The Old Masters. I spend a long time preparing the boards with umpteen layers of gesso so that I’m able to repeatedly rework the drawings with sandpaper, etching needles and scalpel blades as well as with the points of silver wire. It’s a very subtle medium in that it has a limited tonal range: the line won’t be made anymore emphatic for being being pressed harder. It’s an unprectable medium: the traces tarnish with time to a warm. It’s tricky to rub out silverpoint lines (think of a coin scratched across an emulsion-painted wall) and so the mark is a definite, but delicate, trace of the presence of movement (of a moment of life?).
Each of these images includes a block of hand-written text made up of transcriptions of remembered speech. Hand-writing is also a kind of drawing. The repeated layers of handwriting create a sense of spatial depth and distances (and perhaps distances of time) but they are also fragments of sentences which recall remembered speech and stories. The viewer might alternate the gaze between the drawn lines making up the image of the face and the drawn lines of words. I could say a lot more but I’d rather the viewers make up their own minds as they spend time with them and simply looking at them.
The work is gradually ongoing.
This is a drawing from a few years ago. It’s called “They looked like silver birds. The sun was shining on them…” (this is part of a quote from an eye witness account of seeing the German bombers high up in the early evening sun light). It’s about the people who were killed by a single bomb dropped from a German Gotha bomber at about twenty past six in the evening on 25th May 1917. The bomb just happened to land amid a queue of people waiting outside of Stokes’ greengrocers in Tontine Street, Folkestone (the Germans were probably trying to hit the nearby railway line). Scores of people were killed and injured. It happened nearly a hundred years ago. At the site of the explosion there is a modest plaque commemorating event. I want people to know about the people who died. I’ve been working on this project for a few years and I intend to do more work about this as and when time and money allow.
This particular drawing was selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2013 and I’ve exhibited it at a number of galleries since then. It’s always interesting to find out how people respond to it. Since making it I have been contacted by relatives of some of the people who were caught up in the blast and I dearly hope to be able to make new work to incorporate this new information.
The work is made up of sixty-eight gesso panels with drawings and hand-written text. Each panel has, either, the name, age and cause of death of individuals or transcriptions of eye witness accounts of the event. Some panels have more information and some have portrait drawings done in silverpoint. I am still hopeful about finding images of more of these individuals.
There is lots to say about this work but I don’t have time to write more just now but if you go to my wordpress blog (https://royeastland.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/they-looked-like-silver-birds-the-sun-was-shining-on-them/) and click on the ‘Folkestone’ ‘category’ you will find more information there.
Images of Margate people dressed-up in tasteless costumes at parties or at carnivals is nothing new. This is a drawing based on a postcard image from 1930s’ Margate. It’s part of an ongoing series of drawings of people dressed in fancy dress or in uniforms with a connection to Margate. The idea is to produce a series of drawings which bring to mind thoughts about culture, time and place through presenting drawings of people (the details of their clothing and so forth can imply a bigger, social and cultural, picture).
This is a small drawing of about 14.5cm x 21cm in size which is based on the image on a postcard from Margate found in an antique fair near Nottingham. I’ve been making work about this picture, off and on, for a few years. I’ll write about it once I’ve made a proper work of art but for now here are some images.
It’s drawn in metalpoint (silver wire on gesso). The physical characteristics of this medium emphasise the physical qualities of presence and trace and this fits well with my continued artistic preoccupation with human presence and the passing of time. I also find the medium very beautiful.
I can never afford to make the work I’d like to make (the framing alone would be way beyond my means!) and so I don’t know how this work will develop. For example, I’d like to make a separate drawing of each of the people in this picture but I guess this will never happen. Nevertheless, I’m sure there will be other ways to make the art I want to make.
I think of Drawing as a way of thinking: we make sense of what we see when we draw it. I can imagine a version of this work shown with other drawings to invite the viewer to make connections and question what is presented to them i the artwork. We’ll see if this happens. For the time being this drawing is a drawing that is on the way towards other drawings. I doubt if this one is going any further than facebook at the moment.
