Location Art
How location drawing puts things into perspective for me.
Drawing has always been important to me, either in my final artwork or as a way of organising my ideas for non-drawing based illustrations. Back in my days at Norwich School of Art I drew EVERYWHERE - once even in a night-club! I still love looking back at those drawings, and have carried on making new ones in my location drawing sketchbooks to this day.
The practice of recording and visual decision-making while drawing a scene over time, really helps hone your personal observational skills and definitely etches the details of that time deeper into the visual memory. All useful for when you have to draw things in the future!
These are drawings made in my time at Norwich School of Art: In a church at Hunstanton, Caister on Sea, on a train back from Cromer, and Norwich Guildhall.
The drawings I made (and make) become a kind of meditation, with details being added along the way, with the ever-changing subject matter more often than not dictating where the drawing goes.
Often the ideas in a drawing are sparked spontaneously along the way which, for me, this is where the magic is. This happened with this ‘silly’ drawing of the view from John Lewis Cafe in Poole, where I swapped vehicles for large animals. I had no idea that this was going to happen when I sat down with my cappuccino. I still don’t quite know where the idea came from, but I think it just says a lot about the frame of mind I was in at the time. Perhaps not to just record a scene, but to add a bit of imagination into the mundanity.
I have a myriad of ideas, as artists often do, and some manage to get written down but others get lost in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. I find that placing myself in a location and devoting a length of time to drawing something in front of me holds potential for some of these ideas to rise up from their sleep at the back of my brain. This can be true for any drawing practice, but I particularly like the ideas provoked by responding to a particular place at a particular time.
Sometimes though, the drawing remains simply as a record of the scene in front of me. The scene here, in a Poole shopping centre, had people moving quickly through it. I was quite close to them, so the people passing were only in my frame of view for about 2-3 seconds which made it very difficult to draw one particular person in any detail. The lady in the centre of the drawing is an amalgamation of about at least five people! The human figures in the shop gave me slightly more time to draw them, and the dummies were the kindest - they didn’t move at all!
Devoting time to draw from life in specific locations is important to me.
It helps my creative brain to connect with quickly moving scenes, adds much needed observational ideas to my work and allows me to create little visual stories from what is randomly presented to me. It definitely keeps things fresh!