When it comes to drawing in contemporary art, it nowadays tends to be more shock and awe than quiet draughtsmanship. No longer confined to the lowly pencil or stick of charcoal, artists draw with their bodies, they draw with other people’s bodies and, on the odd occasion, some remarkably unpalatable materials. Ewan Gibbs draws in a rather more traditional sense of the word.
Click here to see more of Gibbs' work.
In a sea of brash artistic statements and shock tactics, it would be easy to overlook the delicacy of Gibb’s drawings, a selection of which are currently showing at London’s Timothy Taylor Gallery. He uses good, old-fashioned pointillist techniques, slashes rather than dots, to draw familiar tourist scenes to almost computer-generated effect.
The works on show are 13 scenes from New York, drawn from photographs taken by the artist. Gibbs reduces them to paper-bound pictures of line and tone that are at once both incredibly detailed and incomprehensibly woolly. The effect is like looking at a vaguely familiar scene through heavy sheet rain, or a printout from a printer that’s running low on ink. Upon closer inspection of the drawings nothing more is revealed to the viewer than an abstract collection of tiny, yet impeccably ordered, lines.
More than just hitting upon a clever technique though, there’s a subtlety of purpose behind Gibbs’ work. Places we know through association are presented to us in a way that makes no sense the closer you look at them. It’s only by taking them in from a distance that they become clear, leading us to reconsider what we thought we knew and look at the familiar as if for the first time.
INFORMATION
- Event dates
- 9 September 2008 to 18 October 2008
- Website
- http://www.timothytaylorgallery.com
- Address
- Timothy Taylor Gallery
21 Dering Street
London W1S 1AL
