In-person drawing days at the Royal Drawing School
Concertina drawing made at Arnold Circus.
This week, I'm delighted to be in London, for in-person drawing days at the Royal Drawing School!
It's a chance to finally meet up with everyone from the Online Drawing Development Year 2023, after our year of online classes. And it's also a chance to draw together at the school's beautiful Shoreditch studios!
It was a frosty start, but with beautiful light. We started the first day by wrapping up and heading out to Arnold Circus with concertina sketchbooks. The idea was to draw quite intuitively, using the format to play with space - looking up and down, near and far. So the drawing became not necessarily a depiction of the place, but more a series of moments stitched together. In the afternoon, we used our concertinas in collaborative drawings. It was lovely to respond to the marks of others, and especially as you really felt that you'd got to know each other's work so well through the course.
A visit to Whitechapel to see Nicole Eisenman at Whitechapel Gallery was a great way to round off the day.
On the second of our in-person days at RDS Shoreditch, we explored portraits. The day started with some quick drawings of each other. We then spent the main part of the day working in pairs on collaborative double portraits, and it was really interesting to take it in turns to draw and to be drawn and learn from the other artist’s way of working (I was working with the brilliant Lesley Croxford).
As you can see from the images, the Shoreditch building is very beautiful, and up under the eaves, surrounded by views of rooftops, it has a really special atmosphere.
There was also time to soak up some art. First up we visited David Hockney: Drawing from Life at the National Portrait Gallery. The sensitivity of his marks in all media, whether coloured pencil, charcoal, etching or lithography was stunning. Next up was Impressionists on Paper at the Royal Academy, another stunning exhibition, full of light and colour, and fleeting moments. A visit to Claudette Johnson's show 'Presence', and the Courtauld’s collection was also brilliant, and I really enjoyed drawing from her large scale works.
Thank you very much to RDS and to our core tutors for a fantastic few days!
I loved marks and lines in Claudette Johnson's 'Reclining Figure', with folds in the clothes drawn like rivers and contours, turning the woman's body into a landscape.
Left: Trying to draw from Claudette Johnson's 'I Came to Dance', a work which began as a single curved line. Right: a study of Manet's 'Au Bal' (At the Ball), from the Courtauld collection.