These are some drawings done in a few hours walking around London. Starting in Paddington station, I moved towards Hyde Park and then finished at the cafe at the Royal Albert Hall. The extended moment that we are privileged to see in drawing is particularly unique in the kind of reportage that I am practicing here. While these people are surely observed and did exist (in a form prior to their reshuffling in my mind) the drawings frame that moment in a combination of marks and a construction of an implied or explicit narrative. This narrative is often only available to the artist when the drawing is done or, in those temporal moments when the action of drawing merges with unfolding thoughts and deeply felt impressions. Drawings, like thoughts, shift and change and it is this flexibility that makes creative reportage a dialogue with place. While the drawings may depart wildly from the real and observed, they could not have come to be without the feedback received by looking, thinking and making. In fact, if there is something vital to drawing itself (even work that is not anchored in observation) it is the bristling, inexorable link to a world that means something to us. This commitment happens first when the artist sees either through observation or in the minds eye, a discernible truth. Those temporal passages that speak in a variety of layered, symbolic shorthand, are a declaration of affirmed belief. We believe because the artist believes. And so the storyteller wanders on.
As always, illustration work can be seen at http://www.louisnetter.com
Life's Too Short For Nuance 
Leave a Reply