Bristol Drawing School has been kindly asked to curate the Methuen Gallery for this show and we will be showing a range of artists who have exhibited with us in the past, and some from the future.
Bristol Drawing School is a not for profit private arts venue and education facility that aims to encourage and nurture the art of drawing, not only as an art form in its own right, but as an essential part of the creative process. It offers drawing courses and workshops throughout the year as well as curating a regular series of exhibitions and artist talks.
For more information go to www.drawingschool.org.uk
“The artists selected for this room are all connected with the Bristol Drawing School either as tutors, students or artists that have exhibited there. This wide range of work, from the expansive landscapes to the intimate and personal, and from the intricate and layered to the bold and expressive all illustrate the variety of different approaches to making marks on paper.”
- Graham Woodruff, Director, Bristol Drawing School
“Drawing is my blackbird song. I sing and that's all. Each drawing is a scrap of a song. It's taken years of practice just to get that far - which, compared to what a blackbird can sing, isn't far at all. Each new song is an unfolding of what, until then, has not been sung. I don't know where it's going, other than to the next song. And that's enough: just one more song, and one more song after that, and so on, until I can no longer sing my blackbird songs. But that's all right - for another blackbird will come along with new songs and the wheel will turn.”
- Extract from comments about his work Distance by Robert Clarke
Information on Participating Artists
Jason Hicklin
Jason's large drawings specialise in the wild weather from the coastline of the British Isles and Ireland where rain, landscape and sea collide, merging these forces into a heady mix of tones where rocks are huddled against the relentless assault of the elements and the earth and sky dissolve.
Graduating from St.Martin’s in 1988 and then from The Central School of Art in 1993, Jason was elected a member of The Royal Society of Painters and Printmakers in 1993 and now holds the position of Royal Engraver. Jason is currently a lecturer of Printmaking at City and Guilds Art School in London and has his own studio in Shropshire.
Carol Peace
Inspired by the opening of the Bristol Drawing School, sculptor Carol has undergone a period of intense study into drawing. You will be able to see many of the artist's working sketches, which are fascinating; the quick seemingly effortless marks that can only come through study and an intense concentration within the life room. She describes it as "just a desperate attempt to describe this fantastic thing in front of me."
Fran Richardson
Concerned with the relationship between corporeal and psychological space, Fran’s drawings are a visual enquiry into our perceptual experience of the domestic interior. Central to the work is the role memory plays in eliciting the complex emotional responses that can cause our experience of the spaces we inhabit to become fluid and unstable, undermining reality to evoke a strange sensation of perceptual confusion.
Ruth Wallace
Ruth makes large-scale drawings in charcoal, graphite and mixed media. Her recent work, which centres on portrayals of women’s clothing, explores the dichotomy between absence and presence and the homely and the disturbing in relation to the domestic interior. It also addresses issues connected with memory and female identity and is informed by the distinctive visual style of film noir.
Kate Raggett
Kate has a studio in Spike Island in Bristol. She travels extensively to different countries and makes drawings in and of the lands that she visits. The drawings map the experience of being in the landscape, its rhythms, energy and patterns.
Fiona Robinson
Fiona's drawings, are part of an evolving body of work investigating the nature of journeys and memory. They are a mapping of the experience of moving from one place to another, from one period of time to another, as well as a meditation on the process of making art. A multilayered record of an experience rather than a linear sequence describing one event, the building up of increasingly insistent webs of lines creates a spatial depth that suggests both distance travelled and time elapsing. In tandem with these investigations these works deliberately question the nature of the drawn mark, challenging the notion that paint and canvas should be labelled as painting.
Ian Chamberlain
Ian's drawings are part of a series investigating form and structure. The Purpose of these drawings is to give a sense and a feel for the object, looking at how you see rather than what you see. The drawings were sketched on site and then added to from memory.The drawings are built up and edited over time showing that they are a visibly altered image constantly being scrutinized and re-worked giving the drawing an existence of its own rather than a perfectly re-produced image.
Valerie Bowes
In times when art is conceptual, virtual, digital, when artists strive to shock, to force their audience to react somehow to the dullness of everyday life, and when the public in turn seeks in contemporary art the entertainment and thrill of the amusement park, Valerie Bowes dares to swim against the tide. She uses the brush. She paints the figurative; and she paints the emotional. Her work is powerful because it communicates directly with the soul.
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