Drawings

hile with painting, you build up your final image with several layers, covering as you go along anything you don�t like, the magic of Drawing is that it is the first and only line. There is no erasing, no covering up, it is the "raw" inspiration, the immediate thought. It is the sorting out of all the mass of detail confronting you, the lines that are the most important to show clearly the particular scene that has so excited you, you simply must share it. It is said that drawing "separates the men from the boys," meaning that you really have to be master of your craft to produce a great drawing, while painting is usually somewhat less "immediate." That�s why I always so loved the oil sketches of Rubens, and some of the other Masters; they have that wonderful spontaneity of a drawing but are done with oil, and I do love that medium. But I love too pen and ink, which I use for my Tree drawings, sometimes touching them up with coloured crayons, and I love "sanguine," the red chalk I always use for drawing the nude, as I like to see the human figure drawn with a red line, rather than black.

• Potraits
• Nudes
• Sketches
• Drapery
• Trees and Landscapes
• Old Master Copies
• Bellmer

   Having a gift as a Draughtsman, I am lucky enough to be able to own just about any drawing in the world, by any artist. I always particularly loved the drawing by Leonardo of "The Battle of Anghiari." It was lost, but fortunately Rubens had made a copy of it first, so we can know it through him. Well, I eventually copied that Rubens copy of the Leonardo, so I can now have it for myself. Daily, I get enormous pleasure from it, as I do from my Brueghel, various other Rubens drawings, my Degas and so on. I absolutely love the drawings of Hans Holbein, so am about to embark on a series of those for myself. At Christmas in 2000, I was somewhat strapped for cash, but wanted to give my wife Marian something spectacular for the Holiday. I asked her, apart from myself, who was her favourite Artist? She answered unhesitatingly "Hans Bellmer," so I decided to make her a Bellmer drawing for Christmas. But when I started copying his work, I found it simply so unbelievably brilliant and beautiful I got completely carried away, and made her a whole collection of Bellmer drawings. It is such a pity that the explicitness of his erotic subject matter prevents him from being as famous as far lesser artists, although I do understand it, as not everyone can take sexual material under their noses or on their walls, for whatever reasons. Anyway, he was one of the great draughtsmen of all time, and I show some of the copies I made of his glorious work, along with a few of my Old Master collection.

   When making a copy of a drawing, there are two ways of approaching it. First one can try to copy it line for line, in which case there will be an inevitable "stiffness" about the work. Or, secondly, one can simply go for the "Spirit" of the work, in which case it could easily be identified as "not the original" but at the same time can possess the "essence" of the original drawing. Since I am never interested in passing my drawings off as the originals, but do them only for my pleasure in having the images on my walls, I always go for the second manner, drawing it freely with only the vaguest following of the original line. Happily I have always ended up with the essence of the beloved drawing I so coveted. That is luck!

The Sketch

here is a decided difference between a sketch and a drawing. A drawing is a highly finished work, often equal, I believe, to a painting. A sketch, however, is a "note," like a quick note in a diary to remind oneself of something, or make brief comment, but in (brief) line. A sketch is a note to oneself in which words are replaced by lines. Most sketches take only a few seconds to produce. When I was drawing in San Francisco, on large sheets of beautiful hand-made paper, I carried around a sketch book with me in a bag on my shoulder, and if I saw anything on my way to the drawing site that caught my eye, I would stop, make a few lines to remind myself later of this or that tree, and maybe go back and make a full scale drawing of it some other day. The same when I had models; I would often make a rapid sketch to remind me later of some pose they struck on their way to the pose of the day. Naturally, I have made hundreds if not thousands of sketches, as it is my manner of informing and reminding myself of things. Sometimes, on looking at a sketchbook years later, I have found a few so appealing in their spontaneity and simplicity, the purity of their line, I have actually made and framed a collection of them, which bring me as much pleasure as the more "serious" works I have managed to keep out of sentiment. I reproduce a few favourites here, some figures and some trees. I�m sure you will see - and perhaps enjoy as I do - the difference in technique between a drawing and the sketch.