OCTOBER 2022
SOUTH AND CENTER GALLERIES
Recent Works | Graham Dane
Graham Dane presents drawings after works by Rembrandt: a return to semi-figurative work after over twenty years as an abstract painter. Studies, large and small, eventually destined for bigger paintings on canvas. In the Center Gallery are other recent drawings, all small scale studies, experimentations in themselves.
One of my oldest possessions – apart from a couple of toys/books currently in my parent’s attic back in the UK – is a framed print of the Kenwood Rembrandt self-portrait that my mother gave me when I was seventeen. At college my drawing instructor used to talk about “artists who should be locked away to give the rest of us a chance”. He used to name Rembrandt as one of them. (John Singer Sargent’s another,) Since art school I’ve produced drawings after the Dutchman’s paintings, spending many hours at London’s National Gallery in front of Belshazzar’s Feast.
During the pandemic I returned to looking at Rembrandt, initially producing a series of small- scale graphite drawings after Faustus and Belshazzar’s Feast that led to the larger charcoal works and paintings some of which are displayed here.
Working from figuration to abstraction there’s a process: smaller representational pieces, each progressively getting bolder, more directional with line or shape/color, increasingly about the original image’s pure composition; always an element of improvisation (why Belshazzar looks different), of asking questions, allowing the paint/colour combinations to make suggestions for the next mark and/or marks. Improvisation is key. The end point is always a surprise and never expected.
Painting is a very human activity that can be traced back tens of thousands of years; it’s an ancient activity. In an increasingly tech-orientated world, a world of cell phones, Instagram, of instant gratification and cheap mass production, of being drowned out by the cacophony of social media, what could be more humanizing than looking at art and producing something new, unique, that requires quietude, an intellectual and emotional foundation and physical effort beyond using just your thumb and index finger.
In addition to the works after Rembrandt, also shown this month are charcoal drawings from other series of work.
I returned after many years away to drawing with charcoal after watching my university students enjoying themselves getting messy, pushing it (plus compressed charcoal and/or chalk) around. Everything is recent - drawing as a serious activity in itself, to explore new ideas, languages, of thinking with carbon. You might say that there’s an obsessional quality to it – some five hundred in the last three years. These are a selection from several series:
Drawings from a Pandemic
A Chlorine Aqualung
Phoenix
All three were related and/or came out of the (on-going) pandemic years. There’s a fantastic cartoon by Pablo Helguera, a woman turning round to an artist saying, “I was really beginning to like this until you started explaining it.”
I’ll leave it there.
