Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing catalogue text

“I am yet to discover an app or design program that is able to describe the fragility and convolutions of contemporary western culture more aptly than drawing. While the circular marks in Joy Hallucinations appear side by side as amorously as the knit pattern of a scarf or jumper, the overlapping bands of colour fluctuate more like fast digital afterglow than a delicate weave. The illusory digital quality of this net like construction results from the meticulous and intricate labour of drawing.” - Steven Asquith

National library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Freehand: recent Australian drawing/edited by Linda Michael. 9781921330186 (pbk) Drawing, Australian - 21st century-Exhibitions. Art Modern – 21st century - Exhibitions. Heide Museum of Modern Art. 741.994

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Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing Robert Nelson January 19, 2011

THE artist eX de Medici puts the wing back into drawing. Her Tooth and Claw emblazons a large horizontal field with two machine guns festooned with blooms, bunting and birds, flapping their wings around a corpse.

As well as creating this airborne gothic fantasy of macabre beauty, de Medici also contributes a beautiful poem for the exhibition freehand: recent Australian drawing at Heide. In the catalogue, she observes how certain commentators call the art ‘’droring’’, which goes with snoring and boring. Just as Australians sometimes say “Lore and order” instead of law and order, drawing gets drawn into an R which isn’t meant to be there. Instead, you almost have to pronounce the ‘’wing’’ in drawing.

Drawing used to have a lot in common with grammar and elocution, because it was all about recognising structures. Half a century ago, when sharp pronunciation was also expected on the ABC, drawing was the art of getting things right: it meant sizing up relationships and understanding the reasons for objects and spaces appearing in the proportions that you see.

Nowadays, however, droring rules; and the main reason to take up a pencil or biro is to make a conceptual statement. Or, as Linda Michael reminds us in the catalogue at Heide, artists often feel that “drawings are about not worrying and just enjoying”, which provides a working definition of droring: an introverted hedonism that tackles nothing worth worrying about.

To be fair, the conceptualism in the exhibition isn’t slovenly, even though you’ll find little drawing there in the sense of translating perception of space and volume. But some works present useful parallels to the tussling process of perceptual drawing.

Take Domenico de Clario, whose incantational writing was produced blindfolded in a Shaker community. The remembered chant has to be spread on the page in a legibly spaced-out fashion; so while the artist retrieves the words, he also finds a place for them in a memory of the page and the last lines that the hand deposited there. It replicates the old drawing process in all elements of memory and judgement, except the use of the eyes.

Gosia Wlodarczak also probes the process of drawing, placing a canvas over a motor car and registering the form of the vehicle with a systematic kind of scribble that picks up where the support is firm or stretched over the void. As with a rubbing, the process registers the positive form and the car emerges as a disembodied presence, made up of noisy marks that express its volumes.

In a wide work on a table, Greg Creek shows buildings in Edinburgh, folded into garden imagery, symbols, architectural detail and narrative records of speech. It’s a delicate work of uncertain intentions but sufficiently rich to make you contemplate the details and try to connect them.

With a similar mixture of the obvious and the obscure, the delicate line work of Del Kathryn Barton is reminiscent of Egon Schiele, but the many captions push the erotic figures toward mischievous allegories of female lust, with words and symbols like genitalia, keys and houses. Peter Booth creates unforgettable allegories, like his man poised upon a ball. Other artists seem to engage allegory in their very technique, like the drawn loops of Steven Asquith that suggest crochet; and Newell Harry tinkers with allegory in his anagram Adonis said no, as if the statement stands for all failed love.

Harry’s academy hang of scruffy notation impresses me less; and the sequences of Richard Lewer set up narrative expectations that can never rival South Park. To see how individual works fit well into a conceptual ensemble, Peter Tyndall provides a thoughtful and humorous example. His simple images come with a kind of cryptic chatter, which is absurdist and satirical.

The works of Locust Jones look like anger management but are perhaps more engaging than some of the esoteric aesthetics of Eugene Carchesio, Marco Fusinato, Alasdair McLuckie, Mira Gojak or the formalism of Aida Tomescu or Ken Whisson.

Michelle Ussher’s house is cute but the figure-work is not well drawn. There’s some credible drawing by Laith McGregor, though mannered and obsessive, and Catherine O’Donnell meticulously copies architectural settings.

Nick Selenitsch’s reflections on line marked games of children are evocative; and Sandra Selig’s spiderwebs are an amusing and extreme case of the artist outsourcing the drawing technique.

The Age 17 December 2021 Dan Rule

Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing

THIS vast, vibrant collection of work from 25 contemporary Australian artists casts the act of drawingas an allegory for the autonomy and experimentation at the core of the creative process. Freehand is as much about extending our understanding of what drawing can be, as it is about showcasing the markings of hand and pen. Highlights include Alasdair McLuckie’s folk-art inspired sketchbooks, Marco Fusinato’s “visual score”, and Steven Asquith’s intricate pencil and spray paint works. One of the most unconventional examples is also one of the standouts. It would be easy to miss the microscopic patterns and drawings that adorn Matt Hinkley’s aging computer keyboards and remote controls, but they are some of the most painstakingly intricate and downright fascinating of the lot.