An excerpt from ANNA LOVATT’S introductory essay for Vitamin 3D TODAY’S BEST IN CONTEMPORARY DRAWING, Phaidon Press 2020. DRAWING AS WORLD MAKING….in Spring 2020, Rashid Johnson began a series of ‘Untitled Anxious Red Drawings’ (fig 1) Confined to the house by a stay-at-home order designed to slow the spread of Covid19, Johnson returned to the ‘Anxious Men’ that had inhabited his drawings since 2015. Departing from his earlier use of black soap, wax, or oil stick, he used red oil stick to cover sheets of cotton rag with densely packed boxes. Two ovoid forms at the top of each box and a horizontal scrawl underneath anthropomorphized these repetitive units until they resembled a crowd of faces held tight by the drawing’s gridded structure. Johnson’s red drawings appeared more rapidly executed than their predecessors, with the frenetic movement of his hand unravelling the grid and its fraught countenances. These were drawings for an anxious time, Johnson said, a time that felt radical and urgent. (fig 2)
Fig 1: Rashid Johnson Untitled Anxious Red Drawing 2020 Rashid Johnson Untitled Anxious Drawing 2018 During the pandemic, artists, nurses, journalists, teachers and school children began to draw. As social distancing and stay at home orders were put in place throughout the world, drawings appeared on pavements, in windows, on walls and on the Internet. Artists and teachers led online drawing sessions, while museums released colouring sheets based on works in their shuttered collections. Initiatives like the Artist Support Pledge enabled practitioners who had lost exhibitions, teaching jobs and technical support to sell their work and purchase the work of others. Johnson’s drawings were sold online, with a percentage of the profits donated to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
Fig 2: Oh Young-jun from the series, ‘Nursing Story’ 2020 A Swansea mum, documenting family life in Lockdown …Why drawing now? The answers are complex and manifold. With limited access to studios, materials, fabricators and studio assistants, artists known for their work in other media have turned to drawing. People draw to pass the time, or calm the mind, harnessing the therapeutic properties of drawing, long recognised in the field of psychology. In public spaces and liminal zones such as windows, doorways, porches and balconies, drawings express frustration, hope and solidarity to passers-by. Drawings can function as journals or documents – poignantly, as in the sketches (fig 2) made by South Korean critical care nurse Oh Young-jun. For some, drawing is simply a means of psychological or economic survival. ANNA LOVATT (Assistant Professor of Art History Southern Methodist University, Dallas) 2021.
My Response Comments:
I considered it important to find a piece of writing that was both relevant to our times and personal to me. Lovatt’s writing here documents well the human need for expression through drawing especially during times of uncertainty. This is not a new thing; as drawings made through such periods exist across the world. Being isolated as we have been, the need to articulate how we’re feeling within our communities is an inevitable reaction to our altered homelands. It’s true to say that I found a ‘license’ to draw myself out of trouble when visiting a 1997 exhibition at The Haywood. It was called ‘Beyond Reason’ and showed pieces from the Prinzhorn Collection. Hans Prinzhorn was probably the first clinical psychiatrist to acknowledge a creative relationship between the maker and the thing made. He called the primary metaphysical human function the ‘expressive urge’, and this is evident in all the psychiatric patients’ drawings; all the unique marks, many repetitive, all of them communicating esoteric personal thoughts. (images 1 and 2) Indeed, communities across the world have demonstrated that same ’expressive urge’. The experience of seeing this collection was cathartic. I began working with a new-found conviction and my drawings started to become a form of handwriting, habitual now - decades later. Images 1: The miraculous shepherd August Natterer Image 2: Untitled Henrich M. Like many artists grappling with working during the pandemic, I found that the focus for my interests became eclipsed by the Lockdown situation. (image 3) My work since 2011 has been concerned with making ‘scar drawings’ in response to experiences growing up in a country consumed by conflict. Because these were about old memories, the real-time pandemic state of play overrode everything, and I found accessing my subject matter of this last decade too onerous, too challenging. I believe Covid19 exposed us all to an unparalleled shared trauma as we adapted to a different world with a faceless adversary. Collectively and individually we reacted to the strain and tension surrounding the pandemic, shifting between feelings of agitation and immobilization; waves of panic seeing new headlines; and then a sense of resignation and acceptance as the new disease weaves through populations across the globe. In crisis we mark that time. Human resilience shown through the power of art has surfaced in examples chronicling events that impacted on the peoples of those times; fires, floods, plagues, revolutions, world wars and conflicts. We write, we draw, we document, and we create. Sometimes it’s easier to have dialogue when we don’t speak; when what we make does that talking. I believe the Artist Support Pledge, to which I subscribed, (image 4) was instrumental in keeping the art community engaged. Social media urged people to join a group, support artists and carry on. The initiative, developed by artist Matthew Burrows gave an online community to those without exhibitions and no means of earning a living. The Artist Support Pledge system has since gone global, an example of the creative community pulling together. The art of resilience. The resilience of art. Lovatt writes ‘……drawing’s capacity to pivot between particularity and abstraction – from the most introspective gesture to the diagramming of immeasurable forces – makes it responsive to the volatile temporalities of contemporary life… Image 3: Lockdown series. Prudence Maltby, collage/old drawing Image 4: Artist Support Pledge Prudence Maltby, drawing In conclusion, I believe this text written by Lovatt illustrates the current role of contemporary drawing as acting as an immediate visual exchange between communities. The expanse, look and perception of our community has undergone necessary shift and change, and in some ways more is shared, with increased participation. Artists have seemingly merged more successfully with their communities in a universal interchange of everyone’s urge to express themselves ‘making drawings in an anxious time…’
PRUDENCE MALTBY Salisbury March 2021
Fig 1: Rashid Johnson Untitled Anxious Red Drawing 2020 Rashid Johnson Untitled Anxious Drawing 2018 During the pandemic, artists, nurses, journalists, teachers and school children began to draw. As social distancing and stay at home orders were put in place throughout the world, drawings appeared on pavements, in windows, on walls and on the Internet. Artists and teachers led online drawing sessions, while museums released colouring sheets based on works in their shuttered collections. Initiatives like the Artist Support Pledge enabled practitioners who had lost exhibitions, teaching jobs and technical support to sell their work and purchase the work of others. Johnson’s drawings were sold online, with a percentage of the profits donated to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
Fig 2: Oh Young-jun from the series, ‘Nursing Story’ 2020 A Swansea mum, documenting family life in Lockdown …Why drawing now? The answers are complex and manifold. With limited access to studios, materials, fabricators and studio assistants, artists known for their work in other media have turned to drawing. People draw to pass the time, or calm the mind, harnessing the therapeutic properties of drawing, long recognised in the field of psychology. In public spaces and liminal zones such as windows, doorways, porches and balconies, drawings express frustration, hope and solidarity to passers-by. Drawings can function as journals or documents – poignantly, as in the sketches (fig 2) made by South Korean critical care nurse Oh Young-jun. For some, drawing is simply a means of psychological or economic survival. ANNA LOVATT (Assistant Professor of Art History Southern Methodist University, Dallas) 2021.
My Response Comments:
I considered it important to find a piece of writing that was both relevant to our times and personal to me. Lovatt’s writing here documents well the human need for expression through drawing especially during times of uncertainty. This is not a new thing; as drawings made through such periods exist across the world. Being isolated as we have been, the need to articulate how we’re feeling within our communities is an inevitable reaction to our altered homelands. It’s true to say that I found a ‘license’ to draw myself out of trouble when visiting a 1997 exhibition at The Haywood. It was called ‘Beyond Reason’ and showed pieces from the Prinzhorn Collection. Hans Prinzhorn was probably the first clinical psychiatrist to acknowledge a creative relationship between the maker and the thing made. He called the primary metaphysical human function the ‘expressive urge’, and this is evident in all the psychiatric patients’ drawings; all the unique marks, many repetitive, all of them communicating esoteric personal thoughts. (images 1 and 2) Indeed, communities across the world have demonstrated that same ’expressive urge’. The experience of seeing this collection was cathartic. I began working with a new-found conviction and my drawings started to become a form of handwriting, habitual now - decades later. Images 1: The miraculous shepherd August Natterer Image 2: Untitled Henrich M. Like many artists grappling with working during the pandemic, I found that the focus for my interests became eclipsed by the Lockdown situation. (image 3) My work since 2011 has been concerned with making ‘scar drawings’ in response to experiences growing up in a country consumed by conflict. Because these were about old memories, the real-time pandemic state of play overrode everything, and I found accessing my subject matter of this last decade too onerous, too challenging. I believe Covid19 exposed us all to an unparalleled shared trauma as we adapted to a different world with a faceless adversary. Collectively and individually we reacted to the strain and tension surrounding the pandemic, shifting between feelings of agitation and immobilization; waves of panic seeing new headlines; and then a sense of resignation and acceptance as the new disease weaves through populations across the globe. In crisis we mark that time. Human resilience shown through the power of art has surfaced in examples chronicling events that impacted on the peoples of those times; fires, floods, plagues, revolutions, world wars and conflicts. We write, we draw, we document, and we create. Sometimes it’s easier to have dialogue when we don’t speak; when what we make does that talking. I believe the Artist Support Pledge, to which I subscribed, (image 4) was instrumental in keeping the art community engaged. Social media urged people to join a group, support artists and carry on. The initiative, developed by artist Matthew Burrows gave an online community to those without exhibitions and no means of earning a living. The Artist Support Pledge system has since gone global, an example of the creative community pulling together. The art of resilience. The resilience of art. Lovatt writes ‘……drawing’s capacity to pivot between particularity and abstraction – from the most introspective gesture to the diagramming of immeasurable forces – makes it responsive to the volatile temporalities of contemporary life… Image 3: Lockdown series. Prudence Maltby, collage/old drawing Image 4: Artist Support Pledge Prudence Maltby, drawing In conclusion, I believe this text written by Lovatt illustrates the current role of contemporary drawing as acting as an immediate visual exchange between communities. The expanse, look and perception of our community has undergone necessary shift and change, and in some ways more is shared, with increased participation. Artists have seemingly merged more successfully with their communities in a universal interchange of everyone’s urge to express themselves ‘making drawings in an anxious time…’
PRUDENCE MALTBY Salisbury March 2021
