An Observation on Drawing

Earlier this month, the Architect’s Journal asked me to write a short piece on my life drawing with Architecture LGBT and I'm delighted to expand on this to highlight a few key influences and ideas.

In day-to-day practice, drawings are endlessly revised and reissued—precise and technical. They are a tool for communication and are relied upon to provide instructions for builders. Yet it is easy to lose sight of other types of drawing. Types that are more personal and act as an intimate means of thinking.

I try to practice life drawing as much as possible, to facilitate broader observation and drawing skills. These drawings tend to be fast-paced and try not to depict the sitter accurately: linear perspective is not primary. Siza’s Self Portrait (as shown above) displays the power of breaking away from accuracy for accuracy’s sake. The flatness of the mirror and the height of the subject's reflection in the mirror give compositional richness and heightened drama. The inclusion of the hand drawing establishes a playful dialogue between the artist and viewer. Siza’s body is broken down into two sets of feet, a head and shoulders, and a drawing/drawn hand, with the viewer left to reconstruct the sitter themselves.

Schiele’s Zeichnungen IV (above) similarly leaves parts of the sitter removed (this time just the head) and this both causes a dramatic composition and allows the viewer to focus on formal qualities such as line and space rather than the personality of the sitter. It is a drawing of analysis. In all my drawings, I never depict the body as a unified whole, I always want to achieve a dramatic charge as strong as that of Siza or Schiele.

The thin line weights of many of Hockney’s drawings including Portrait of Cavafy II, put further emphasis on composition and how space is enclosed. There is a similar flatness to Siza’s drawings and the subject and background are a continuum. This is particularly evident where the car in the midground meet the lapel of the subject’s blazer. The artist that takes this dissolution to the strongest degree is Frank Auerbach. Ruth I shows how bold marks can combine to produce a subject just on the verge of being present. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy, emphasizes perception as an embodied experience. It is not passive but actively involves the whole body in shaping our understanding of the world: drawing becomes a physical dialogue between the artist, the medium, and the subject—an intimate interplay of perception and bodily action. For these artists of the 20th century, I would suggest the act of drawing prioritizes visceral, sensory encounters, communicating through tactile immediacy rather than narrative clarity.

Some of my drawings use loose marks as a way of dissolving the sitter and the background into an ambiguous field. I like to give the shadows the same importance to make the drawing hard to read.

The viewer has to spend time working through the drawing and hopefully it gives a new way of seeing bodies in space: people are always situated in a context and relate to objects: another life drawer’s shoe, a wine glass, and a column. My limitation to three colours and never erasing hopefully captures the spontaneous process of how a drawing is made: there is an energy and intimacy to observing a model and quick sketches, often completed in just a few minutes, frequently become my favourite drawings.

Jamie Kelly