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A Sketchbook Walk - The Open College of the Arts

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A Sketchbook Walk

In the Recording Britain show at Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries there is a set of four drawings that could almost be part of a submission for the ‘sketchbook walk’ assignment in Drawing One: Drawing Skills.
On the recent study trip, four drawings by Laura Oldfield Ford — made in biro / ink and wash — of derelict and neglected scenes offered us chance to discuss how embracing what might be thought of as visual contradiction can bring interest into our work.
Laura 5
The four drawings, which were framed as one piece, are all exquisitely drawn, reminiscent of silverpoint work. Trees, concrete and metal are all carefully observed and recorded. Although using very little tone, Ford explains space and structure in a calm, delicate way which is a little at odds with the subject matter. I’ve seen a lot of ‘sketchbook walks’ since starting as an OCA tutor and most are of rural or semi-rural scenes. What results is often an attractive view drawn attractively. There’s little or no tension, with everything pointing in the same direction as it were. There’s no difficulty in the work. Ford’s work shows that the overlooked (possibly even the ‘ugly’), might be rendered beautiful with care. It’s here that an image can transcend its subject, escaping mere representation and becoming a thing in its own right. By embracing contradiction something new can be made.
Laura 6
We can see the downside of this in all those kitsch portraits of sweetly melancholic children standing with injured dogs. All of the elements of the work are sweet and melancholic. There’s no difficulty and there’s no need to ever look twice at these things. By looking hard at a scene and trying to find a way to show it that isn’t ‘typical’ or ‘cliched’ something can be activated. Think of Stanley Spencer’s re-imagining of Cookham as a site of momentous religious events or the way that John Piper rethought the colour on the sides of ruins.
Recording is about looking and preserving something, but it falls to the artist to capture something other than just an equivalent. Drawing and painting have a particular knack for shedding light on their subject, isolating and distorting for effect. By approaching contradiction with an open mind, and not following a path that seems well trodden allows something new to happen. Look again. Look harder.
 
Image Credits:
1. Laura Oldfield Ford: Untitled (‘But the time may come sooner than people think’ series) 2008-2009
2. Laura Oldfield Ford: Untitled (‘Elegy for Lammas Land’ series) 2008-2009
3. Laura Oldfield Ford: Untitled (‘Loot Asda Burn Barratts’ series) 2008-2009
4. Laura Oldfield Ford: Untitled (‘Kodes & Kopies’ series) 2008-2009
All http://collections.vam.ac.uk/
 


Posted by author: Bryan

11 thoughts on “A Sketchbook Walk

  • fascinating drawings and so skilfully executed … I find this kind of work refreshing! Interesting too, the focusing on the contemporary as well as the past … one day soon, the contemporary will fade into the past and be gone before we know it.

  • What’s interesting about the image of the walkway is that the righthand side is barely started. This gives us a chance to see how it’s made. It looks like some pale grey inkwash is put down first to give some tonal ground. The line drawing is then added on top. I can’t Also, the star shaped blank shape in that drawing (which I assume is a bush of some sort) is just left. It reminds me of many of Lautrec’s paintings which were abandoned which much of the board showing, or perhaps it was more deliberate then that. Anyway, a photograph would automatically take in all of the scene and any blanks would have to be added. For work rooted in ‘realism’ (small ‘R’), there’s a good deal of agency being exerted by the artist.
    I’ve just found out that Laura Oldfield Ford has some work in a group show – Unstable Surface – that opens tomorrow night at the Paper Gallery in Manchester.
    http://www.paper-gallery.co.uk/

  • Drawing disused buildings, gap sites and overgrown car parks has become quite a thing of late. Seeing the beautiful in the mundane or ugly, focusing on the space between rural and urban (edgelands) and rendering detail in an obsessive way has given artists scope for new ways of seeing and doing. Even though it has become somewhat fashionable, it is still refreshing in its variety.

  • I think this artist may have been an award winner last year for the campaign for drawing when the theme was to respond to the notion of risk to the landscape. As drawings I find them curiously old fashioned and quiet. As Olivia says there seems to be a vogue for this theme but also for this kind of pencil work (when I was on foundation it was described as “tight” and we were ridiculed by our tutors for working in such a way.)I don’t relate to it much myself although I did enjoy reading Bryan’s lucid and thoughtful response to it.

  • A literary equivalent of this kind of drawing is Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’s collection of essays, Edgelands. This is psychogeography territory, looking at the part of the world that we don’t normally pay much attention to or tend to deliberately disregard. It can be very interesting but it can also slip into its own world of cliché, as I think Edgelands tends to. I agree with the comment that there is also something old-fashioned about these drawings. The urban subject matter apart, the kind of delicate touch and attention to depicted detail reminds me of the drawings and watercolours, even the oil paintings to some extent, of (MIldred) Elsie Eldridge (1909-91), whose work looks right in its period, conveying an idealist-romantic mood through wonderfully observed drawing and painting. By drawing attention to that kind of mid-20th century work, which I don’t disparage but would contextualise, I am not sure (and I mean ‘not sure’ and uncertain, not covert disagreement) about Bryan’s judgement that these drawings deal with difficulty and contradiction. Choice of subject matter is only part of the game. Couldn’t it also be argued that, through such a controlled drawing technique (whatever its organisational principles), Oldfield Ford slips over the surface of the observed world, rather than engaging with the knotty problem of observing-drawing it? As a draughtsperson, does she really put her cards on the table?
    Paul

  • Mmm, finding interest in the ugly reminds me of the work by Paul Nash during WWI it’s certainly not ‘twee’ and certainly does create emotion.

  • Since my last comment, I have been thinking about other precedents for this, and Nash was one person who came to mind. But the context is too different, I think. Also, for me, it is not a matter of ugliness but, in a way, something more mundane and perhaps also less judgemental about what is or not interesting as subject matter. I’m still curious about what Bryan has offered us here. I’m at ease with the subject matter of these drawings but not grabbed by their subjects. So, does their subject matter transcend cliché, and are they interesting as drawings, as distinct from what may be done with other media?. In both respects, it is hard to be sure, and partly for the prosaic reason that I can only see them as quite small images (on a hi-res screen) and I don’t know how big the original works are.
    So let’s put another name into play. I am thinking back to Peter Lanyon’s drawings of the post-industrial landscape of Penwith, Cornwall. Ruined tin mines dealt with dramatic gestures, and very modernist it is to be sure. But perhaps, arguably, these works are better integrations of that kind of concern with subject matter (don’t ignore the underlying implied narratives) and the act of drawing.
    Paul

  • In my view, Laura Oldfield Ford does engage with the subject in her drawings. The surface textures are finely observed, and she composes the image on the edge of harmony, with just enough tension to reflect the fragmented and disordered landscape. The series is indeed a sketchbook walk, one of Debord’s derives, with points of view actively selected, and I think Ford tries to simulate how when we look, we focus on specifics and don’t take in all the detail; as Bryan suggests unlike a photograph.
    I took an interest in Laura Oldfield Ford’s drawings when I saw her work featured in the book “Extraordinary Sketchbooks” and I started following her blog Savage Messiah (http://lauraoldfieldford.blogspot.co.uk/). Her work is quite varied in use of drawing media, text and paint (often watercolour). Her work has a strong political edge, albeit relentlessly bleak.
    The more powerful statement for me, is one of equality, it is the selection of the everyday and neglected view. It says that every view is worthy of attention, not just the controlled environment of the elite. I haven’t yet seen either this or the V&A Recording Britain exhibition, but it is interesting to start to see the difference in approach. The original exhibition, as I understand, was commissioned to record Britain under threat of Nazi invasion and urban development. From the evidence of these four drawings, Ford is trying to record the landscape that history will otherwise forget. If history is recorded by the dominant culture as it has through the ages (perhaps until Dutch painters, like Vermeer) then we have a collection of historical, biblical or mythical events, and landscapes of the sublime and the aristocracy. I’m quite sure that there would have been plenty of degraded urban and rural landscapes and mundane events in past history. To paraphrase, Hans Peter Feldmann, if only five minutes of every day are interesting, then perhaps Ford is trying to represent the rest, normal life.

  • The original works are about A4 and very ‘tight’, I suppose. My interest in them (aside form liking their execution and subject matter, but that’s taste and therefore subjective) is that there’s an internalised contradiction. The same might be said of Warhol’s (very different) work. It looks like it’s about surface and the commercial world, but so much of his work was dark and obsessed with mortality/death.
    It’s that that I was trying to get across. If all the elements were aligned, then it would be kitsch, like the positivity of a sports event or the unrelenting dedication to a particular idea of ‘rock’ that Metal embodies. There’s little room for critique in such an environment. The slight mis-match offered in the juxtaposition of style and substance (a version of ‘contrapposto’ perhaps?), allows the artist to comment on the thing they inhabit.
    Of course, that can they become a new trope as the contradiction becomes fully assimilated into the form. Perhaps this work is a bit like that. Mandy Payne’s work (also on display here and in the John Moores, too) as well as George Shaw’s patrol the same beat, though with different results.

  • Thanks for the further comments and for the link to the Savage Messiah blog. I have had an interesting hour or so reading Laura Oldfield Ford’s writing and looking at the dozen or so drawings and paintings posted there. I have a much clearer line of sight now. I have not lived that kind of scary, marginal life, although I share similar if not exactly the same political angers, and am closer to the woman who shouted that their rioting was ‘spoiling her cause’. So no, these are not aristocrat and sublime works, not in the obvious senses… but yes, they are too; the symbol systems of a particular aristocracy of a particular tribe, with its own sense of the sublime. I can see that and be very drawn to it, without quite belonging, or wanting to belong. A much more solitary animal, living at the edge of a wood somewhere in France, where, faute de mieux, I am obliged to pay attention to the particularities of the ‘natural’ world… and to my own ancient tribalisms.
    I can see more clearly on her blog how good her drawings and paintings are. No, they are not tight, and not unstructured; and there is a strong sense of a particular way of looking-cum-mark-making. There is some variation in that, and I have the thought that perhaps there could be more; just a bit more of a sense that each work is a fresh look at the world, in the conditions, internal and external, of that given moment of looking-working. But it’s a passing thought, more like a reminder to myself. Then back to looking at her work.
    Not surprisingly, I find the landscapes (‘scenes’ would be a better word for most of them) easier to relate to than the human subjects. The mark making in the drawings is decisive, delicate, brittle and fretful by turns, while holding to its depictive and expressive purposes within the scene. Things crumble at the edges and within works (that chair disappearing into the house wall in the “I’ll Fuck You Next” painting). Balances are struck as nicely as is needed between generalisation and particularisation. Pencil marks flow across a floor, as a physical encroachment, as a nervous estrangement. Lighter marks flutter the leaves of a fallen tree. And so on…
    But do these works mark such a major paradigm break? No. They are within the (Western) Tradition as much as they test it and push it about. But that’s good. Increasingly, I think that that is how things should be… some of the time, anyway. Perhaps the most grotesque and contradictory work of all is the second drawing on her blog (posted 22.04.14); the riparian scene with rocks, paths, hollows, protuberences… . Ever heard of Wang Meng?
    Paul

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