There is a painting by Philip Guston called The Line (1978), in which a red, veiny hand descends from the clouds, and draws a line with a stick of charcoal held between two fingers. God is drawing a line and daring us to step over it. He is also establishing His credentials as the first and most original of all artists, having created the world and everything in it. Are we a finished work or just a preliminary sketch? Something revised and refined, or simply knocked off?
God’s not telling, but one thing is certain: it all begins with that first mark that delimits infinite space. It’s the same process repeated by every artist who takes a pencil, a pen, a brush or a piece of charcoal, and draws a line on a virgin sheet of paper. From that primal mark, the most minimal or elaborate drawing may grow.
Drawing is frequently described as “the bones of art”. To Ingres it was “the probity of art”. As artistic movements and fashions succeed one another, drawing grows more or less important, but will always be present because it captures the vital creative impulse that links the eye, the mind and the hand in a way AI will never be able to duplicate.
I could talk all day about what makes a “good” drawing, but if I picked up a pen and tried to produce one, the results would be laughable. Beyond a certain level of cultural sophistication, drawing is a skill that may be learned by dint of a little instruction and a lot of practice. If there are brilliant drawings produced by children and completely untrained artists, this merely serves to underline an important point: that a drawing is a concrete expression of a mental process. It is as varied as we are in our complex, individual personalities. Every drawing is a statement of identity that tells us a great deal about the artist.
This is what “identity” should mean in art – an ineluctable confluence of personality and expression – not a dreary checklist of gender or ethnicity. We respect the art and the artist by first attending to what meets the eye and only then considering the context from which a work has emerged. In a museum, which needs to be exacting in its standards, there should be no special pleading for uninteresting, self-conscious and second-rate works of any persuasion.
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These may seem rather weighty considerations by way of preamble for a review of the Dobell Drawing Prize, now in its 23rd iteration, but it’s better to start with serious intent and let frivolity slip in by the backdoor. Like all open competitions, the Dobell is necessarily a mixed bag. This year’s judges have aimed to be inclusive, avoiding the temptation to show too many pieces that “challenge” the medium. Neither have they allowed themselves to get bogged down with more conventional expressions.
Overall, it’s a good selection, although there’s little that really stands out. What we get is one of those comfortable surveys that reassures us there are a lot of accomplished artists out there making solid, skilful work. I’ll take it any day over some half-baked attempt at avant-garde iconoclasm, but competitions – from the Dobell to the Archibald – are never better than samplers. One can only ever take the measure of an artist from a solo exhibition, but alas, in Australia, competitions remain the best way for an artist to be seen and known.
There are 64 finalists, so if I discuss only a few of them this is no reflection on the multitude that miss out. There are so many types of drawing it’s hard to make meaningful comparisons. Perhaps this is the reason the judges went for Jane Grealy’s Maria’s Garden, Scheme C, as the winner, as it does two different things within the same frame.
Upon a dense, realistic depiction of plants and scaffolding, Grealy has superimposed a thin white outline of a proposed building. The work relates to her previous occupation as an architectural illustrator, but also implies a melancholy reflection on time and change. Grealy is aware that the garden Maria has tended over so many years, will one day be swallowed by new suburban developments. Those of us who live in the inner suburbs see this scenario played out in our streets with increasing rapidity.
Grealy has tried to bring the past, present and future into a work of great technical dexterity. With some competitions it’s clear the judges have gone in with an agenda that overrides a close consideration of the finalists and their merits. In this instance, the opposite applies, as one can appreciate the logic of a decision that rewards both form and content.
It’s the philosophical dimension that distinguishes Grealy’s work from that of many other contenders. John Bokor’s Two rooms, for instance, is a strong drawing in a style that owes a debt to Matisse, and to British artists such as Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. The major objects in the composition have been forcefully outlined, with suggestive smudges of charcoal supplying a sense of depth and of previous, more tentative mark-making. One can feel how the picture begins in uncertainty and ends in a determined flourish, giving a pleasing sense of resolution.
Of the more experimental works, I can’t overlook Julie Rrap’s heroic feat, at the age of 73, to squirm naked on a large sheet of paper tracing around parts of her body in charcoal. It’s a messy process that underlines the highly physical and tactile nature of drawing. Essentially a performance captured on video, it’s a work in which the artist not only produces a drawing but becomes a part of the drawing.
Another unconventional work, Jayanto Tan’s Waterfall in the Moon Garden, is a product of process and patience. Tan has created three long draperies by stitching together used tea bags. The effect is delicate and strangely tasteful, with the pale beige-brown of the tea bags giving a sense of a weathered landscape, while conjuring up thoughts of the many hours of tea and conversation that lie behind this trove.
The most delicate piece in the exhibition may be Sandra Kiris’s Becoming, which is no more than a set of intertwined lines drawn with almost unbelievable precision in chalk pastel on a dark background. It’s meditative in the manner of a Rothko painting, asking viewers to submerge their consciousness in the play of form, as if each wavy line were a path to infinity.
Kiris’ ethereal lines find an earthy response in Claire Tozer’s From 33,000 ft - an exercise in sustained mark-making, in which the scarred surface of the picture conjures up the rough, textured crust of the planet seen from the air. Although it’s presented as a landscape, the power of the drawing is its sheer physicality, as the artist has worked back into the surface again and again.
I don’t know anything about Sue Field’s private life, but when an artist makes a drawing of water flooding through open doors, a red telephone on the wall, and the score of Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht in the foreground, some sort of crisis seems likely. The Verklärte Nacht (AKA. Transfigured Night) (1899), was the expressionistic piece of music Schönberg wrote when he met his future wife, Mathilde Von Zemlinsky. It would be an intense, strained relationship that led to one of fin de siècle Vienna’s great stories of adultery, scandal and suicide. I hope Sue Field is having a quieter time of it.
Finally, two drawings that stayed in my mind for different reasons were S.C. Grennan’s Layers are for Losers (Rococo Vanitas), and Teo Treloar’s The Plague, Penguin Books Edition, Australia.
The former is one of the most original works in the show, although I can’t pretend to know what it’s all about. In a tremulous drawing seemingly made by holding two pencils together, Grennan has depicted a sumptuous Rococo interior inhabited by two skeletons. In style and content, the work is reminiscent of James Ensor’s drawings. The artist’s own theoretical statement only tends to add confusion to what is essentially, a memento mori – a reflection on the vanity of all these encrustations of culture by which we try to define ourselves and create a smokescreen against death.
Treloar’s The Plague is one of the simplest and smallest drawings on display, but it carries a lot of weight. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, there were many people, self incuded, who took Camus’s great novel of 1947 down off the shelf. Treloar says he has acquired 35 separate editions. One of them must be the same as my copy, with the lurid Michael Ayrton dustjacket, but it was important for this work that the artist drew the plain early Penguin edition. This careful drawing of a worn paperback, on a densely cross-hatched field of grey, conveys a feeling of isolation, such as many people experienced during the lockdowns. One source of relief was through reading, particularly books such as The Plague that seemed to relate in a very deep way to our contemporary experiences. In both reading and drawing, Treloar seems to be saying, there lies an antidote to the chronic state of distraction in which most of us live our daily lives.
Dobell Drawing Prize 2023 is at the National Art School Gallery until June 10.
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