In the last few years there has been a movement back towards drawing in popular culture. Always the poor cousin in the art world, drawing is often seen as ‘doodling’ or the outline/ sketch before a great artwork is created.
Yet in reality drawing requires great skill and technique, patience and attention to detail.
Lots of popular culture magazines including Frankie, Yen, and Vogue are recognising the art of drawing and are opting to use illustration and drawing as an alternative to photographs in the magazine context.
I understand that Frankie Magazine began using illustration within this context because they couldn’t afford the high cost of photo shoots with the celebrities they were featuring in the publication. Therefore they opted instead to pay an artist to render perfect illustrative representations of celebrities, an extremely effective technique that helped this magazine stand out from the crowd. The drawings of celebrities including Rose Byrne, Jake Gyllenhall and Scarlet Johannsen are far more interesting than yet another glamour photo shoot, and they are so perfectly captured by the artist’s hand.
Curvy magazine is a publication entirely dedicated to showing illustrative works by women and it reveals some immense artistic talent.
Despite this recognition in popular culture it seems that the majority of the art world is ignoring this trend and still relegates drawing to the back of the class. ‘Works on Paper’ exhibitions are part of many gallery programs but they tend to be filler shows rather than explorations drawing as a genre of art work.
This exhibition though reveals works on paper and drawings in a new light and includes a variety of styles but there is a synergy between the works because they are based around that most classical of artistic abilities, the skill of rendering an image.
The works are not all classical in style. Jordan Hart has used the ancient Chinese folk-art practice of paper cutting to create his ‘drawings’. Cutting out bits of the page to gently, carefully and slowly create a picture and in the process he subverts the drawing genre to include this paper cut style.
Laura Skerlj’s works appear from a distance to be epic paintings, but are in fact the works of pastels on a dark canvas. Striking and multilayered, she has drawn three animals for this exhibition – a wolf, a deer and a man. Each character appears vulnerable with their eyes hollow and their sparse faces so affecting as you search them for meaning.
Danielle O’Brien’s works reflect a more classical style of works on paper, but always with her unique characterisation. ‘Butterflies’ is a generous, engaging piece with the lines of the figure’s body drawing the viewer in to look more closely at her closed face, curved breasts, soft stomach and voluptuous hips. There is something so comforting, so womanly and gentle about this image.
The pair of ‘Jail Bird’ works reflects O’Brien’s ever engaging connection with the animal world. These small animals are rendered so fragile in these layered images. An ibis, that most despised of scavenger birds becomes the subject of empathy as we stare into his eye and see his beak bound and the sense of humanity reveals itself as we desire to rescue this creature.
All of the works in this exhibition are stand-out on their own but somehow click as a body of work. From the storybook pictures of Lucia Mascuillo, to the cartoonish panda bears by Shaun Campbell, the whimsical, impish fleur de lys by Natalie Perkins, to the textured figures of Nic Plowman and the disconcerting, Carmen Miranda-esque ladies of Yuki Nakano. This is a layered and expansive exhibition utilising a simple artistic style.
