Drawing Exhibition: An Introduction by Martin Yeoman
In the world of Art today there is so much confusion as to what is Art. For instance, drawing to some has been redefined as mark making. To me this is far too crude an expression to describe something that not only involves the total coordination of your eye, mind and hand but also all your feelings about what is in front of you and indeed around you at a specific point in time. Mark making by contrast is the difference between signing your name and taking a thumb print.
Image: Self Portrait | first state View Here
What sparks people off into drawing? In my own case I remember really enjoying it from the age of five. The desire grew inside me I think and later, by looking at books that had great drawings in them, with one book in particular on Rembrandt that fully opens my aspirations. Within that book, it had the all-time great drawing of ‘Two women teaching a child to walk’ which was probably made in under a minute.
What an example! Maybe though it would mean nothing to you if you had no feeling for it. Those of us who wanted to draw when we were children would come back to a drawing such as this and sit and wonder at how someone had managed to capture something so fleeting and convey such life. In my middle years I am still in the same state of wonder at that drawing and so many others, and will be till the day I die.
So if you are young or if you are old and have been reading this, stop now and sit for a very long time and look at Rembrandt’s great drawing reproduced opposite.
Then come and see the exhibition and enjoy the works of acknowledged Masters in drawing from the 19th and 20th century alongside people who draw today. Make your own mind up on how far, or even how not so far, we have got with this great and strangely undervalued art.
This introduction was written by Martin Yeoman for An Exhibition of Drawings, curated by Petleys, London. The exhibition included works by Sir William Orpen, Edward Beale, Augustus John, Ambrose McEvoy, Roy Petley, Pablo Picasso, Martin Yeoman and Henri Matisse.
