This unusual exhibition at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery shows that—for all the publicity given to more innovative genres—the simple, fundamental art of making marks on paper with pen, pencil, charcoal or crayon is still flourishing. This should not surprise us. Many important figures—Frank Auerbach, John Berger, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and David Hockney among them—have repeatedly asserted that drawing is central to their practice. In Hockney’s words, from the website of the Royal Drawing School, “Drawing helps you to put your thoughts in order. It can make you think in different ways.” Or, as Berger puts it, “To draw in order to discover – that is the godlike process… To draw is to know by hand – to have the proof that Thomas demanded.”
The curators—the artist Liza Dimbleby and her father David Dimbleby—have gathered together work by around 100 artists, well known and little known, from the early 19th century to the present day. The inspiration for the exhibition dates back to the Covid lockdowns, when father and daughter sometimes communicated by sending each other small drawings they had made. In the introductory leaflet, Liza Dimbleby sums up the exhibition’s themes in her description of an extraordinary portrait executed near the end of his life by the 18th-century caricaturist James Gillray. Anyone looking at this drawing without prior knowledge would date it at least a hundred years later:
Portrait of George Humphrey II (1811) embodies the sense of stopped utterance, as well as the closeness of drawing to writing, and so opens the exhibition – at its centre a black ink-blot hole indicates a mouth that has almost been swallowed back into the stuttering calligraphy from which it has emerged. Writing and drawing disappearing into the black hole of the open mouth. It was made during a period of mental disturbance, as is recorded (‘he being at that time insane’) over the scored incisions of the author. The open mouth as dark hole, sounding us out.
Dark holes lie at the heart of this exhibition. A gallery assistant came up to me during my first visit and told me the story behind three small drawings (1881 and 1889), by an amateur artist, of a cave known as “Darby’s Hole”. In the 1720s, Parson Darby, a local curate, was appalled by the number of shipwrecks in the area. Finding some natural caverns in the chalk cliffs, he had some of them enlarged to create a “chimney” connecting the beach to the cliff top. Windows cut into this chimney allowed warning lights to be lit on stormy nights. The parson’s gravestone reads, “He was the sailors’ friend.” A black hole as a source of life-saving light—this paradox well captures the exhibition’s themes.
Three tiny pencil drawings, also from the Towner Gallery’s own collection, continue this theme of lives saved and lives in peril. Another amateur artist, Henry Emary, was secretary of the Eastbourne lifeboat institution in the late 19th century. In Lifeboat Entering the Sea (1883), six thin, almost horizontal lines represent the lifeboat’s long oars. Equally tenuous lines represent the masts and rigging of the distressed ship. Slightly curved lines indicate the waves. The sea, the two boats, the lifeboat men and a group of tiny figures on the cliff top—all are woven from the same fabric; the people are one with the cliffs and the sea, yet almost overwhelmed by them. No photograph of the event could convey so strong a sense of the fragility of human life.
Here again, there is a story to be told. On 25th November 1883, Emary received an SOS from a ship in distress—but a fierce gale made it impossible to launch the lifeboat from its usual site. Instead, it was decided to haul the boat five miles up and down steep slopes and launch it from Birling Gap. At one point, this required 10 horses and a great many men—“some of them gentlemen”, according to a contemporary newspaper report—pushing and pulling. After several setbacks, the lifeboat carried out its mission successfully.
Another section of the exhibition, devoted to a “migrant writing project” in Paris, brings us to the present day. A group of asylum seekers, mostly East African, have for several years been meeting in a room in a public library. Among their activities are writing and drawing. Drawing is especially precious, since it enables communication between people with no shared language. A number of simple, handmade books have emerged from this project; some of these, too, depict journeys by sea. The drawings are accompanied by statements all the more moving for their simplicity: “War is not a good idea.” “Le monde est vaste.” “Quand je veux aller Europe, j’ai très peur. Je ne connais pas la natation.” (“When I want to go Europe, I am very frightened. I do not know swimming.”)
Liza Dimbleby teaches at the Royal Drawing School, described on its website as “one of only a few institutions in the world offering in-depth, quality tuition in drawing from observation”. Several of the 75 tutors are represented at the Towner; one of them, Laura Footes, has described her time as a student there as “the single most formative period” of her life to date. I first encountered her work in 2018, when London’s Pushkin House exhibited her huge, fantastically detailed drawings inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The novel has been important to Footes throughout her life, ever since she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at the age of 13. She writes, “I remember the hallucinogenic text coming to life on the morphine: the warped realities, the fragmented time, the visions, and the underlying tension between lucidity and insanity. The dark, twisted, magical realist tone of the novel has influenced my artistic style ever since.” The Towner exhibition includes three of her extraordinary Pain Drawings. These could be called surreal, but they are closer to Bruegel than to Goya or Dalí; Footes’s breadth of imagination is fused with an unerring control of detail. One drawing shows her lying in bed, with a meticulous depiction of a medieval fortress in place of her head. Footes’s artist’s statement is relevant not only to her own work but also to the exhibition as a whole:
In all the chaos, disorder and destruction there was only one true medicine and one true cure: to draw
and draw
and draw
and draw
and draw.
Each line, each image reconfigures reality, reclaims control, reorders through the ownership of this cellular evil, and creates beauty and connection with those who know this experience and those who don’t, as there is nothing more isolating than illness.
You can get swallowed by the black hole of solitude, unless you turn it into ink.
There is a strong central and eastern European presence in the exhibition. Footes tried to learn Russian as a teenager. Liza Dimbleby began drawing and painting during a year as a student in Moscow. Veronika Peat was born in Moscow and has contributed some unsettling drawings of semi-feral children from Russian villages. Among the older generation are David Bomberg, the son of Polish Jews; Arnold Daghani, a Romanian Jew; Leon Kossoff, whose parents were Russian; and Jankel Adler and Josef Herman, both Polish Jews who came to this country to escape the Nazis.
Herman’s life and work exemplify both how necessary it is to address the unspeakable and how agonising this can be. After three years in Glasgow, Herman moved to the Welsh mining village of Ystradgynlais in 1944 and spent most of the next 11 years there. He felt at home in this community and was taken to its heart. He endows the miners he portrays with great dignity. His figurative drawings and paintings from this period are included in many public collections in the UK. Throughout the next 50 years, until his death in 2000, he repeatedly returned to the subject of working men and their families.
Before visiting the Towner Gallery, I had not known of the existence of an earlier body of Herman’s work, carried out in Glasgow and entirely distinct in both style and subject matter. These drawings, a sequence titled “Memory of Memories”, conjure up images of Jewish Warsaw—storytellers, musicians, family members, street scenes and moments from Yiddish literature. For the catalogue of an exhibition held in Glasgow in 1985, Herman wrote that these pen-and-ink drawings “followed a free course”. He continued, “Like a tight-rope walker, I put my trust in the instinct for balance, and drawing lines was a hazardous way of getting to the depth of a memory.” He also, for the first time, employed ink washes, going over the lines with a wet brush. This effectively conveys a sense of the blur of memory, of images emerging from memory or disappearing into oblivion.
In 1942, Herman learned that his entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. In time, he learned that nearly all the Jews in Poland had been sent to the death camps of Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka. Addressing his Jewish past was now more than he could bear. Not only did he turn away from these themes, but for over three decades he never so much as mentioned his “Jewish” drawings. More than that: he wrote in his private journal on 1st October 1948, “I was not at all sorry to part with a lot of the works I did in Glasgow. Took out for burning some pictures and stacks of drawings: a curious delight.” Herman was, no doubt, trying to appease a sense of survivor’s guilt.
Herman’s pain is unimaginable; it is painful even to read this story today. We should be grateful, however, that at least some of these fine drawings survive. Musicians is memorable. Nothing remains of the fiddler’s violin but a few twig-like lines—yet the man plays on defiantly.
Equally remarkable is a drawing titled Study for “In Memory of the Fighters for the Warsaw Ghetto” (1986). This is related to a painting with the same title, begun in 1974 and completed only in 1998. The long gestation testifies, no doubt, to the depth of emotion from which it arose. Herman began it as a tribute to the Ghetto fighters, but wrote in his notebook that “The longer I worked on it, I put in more emotions which wanted to cry out for all the victims of our times: the two million gypsies, the six million Jews, etc. The list is too long for a small page.” Looking at the drawing, we find ourselves gazing once again into a black hole; the mouth of the grieving woman gapes open in a howl of grief or fury.
Herman lived to the age of 89. It is heartening to learn that, in his last years, he had the strength of spirit to return to this theme. The grieving woman, hands raised high in the air, embodies not only pain, but also indomitable strength.
Drawings of loved ones shortly before or after death perhaps deserve an exhibition of their own. In her excellent, recently published The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art, Susan Owens quotes Maggi Hambling: “Artists are lucky in that they can grieve in a very positive way. I’m trying to make these drawings as alive as possible even though the subject is dead, because they’re still alive inside me.” Owens ends her sensitive description of Hambling’s drawing of her dead mother’s face with the words, “Here and there she has subtly shaded eyes, nose and chin by rubbing the surface with her fingers. Last touches, these, but each stroke a renewed connection and an act of remembrance.”
Many of the drawings have a narrative element, and this is particularly true of the various sequences—by Andrzej Jackowski, Ken Kiff, Ansel Krut, Veronika Peat, Emma Talbot and Emma Woffenden—that occupy a prominent place in the exhibition. Some of these works seem schematic—illustrations of a preconceived idea rather than explorations of the unknown. Kiff’s 12 large charcoal drawings, on the other hand, are hard to describe. I think of them as illustrations to forgotten myths or tales yet to be told.
I was struck by Kiff’s use of charcoal in House, Waterfall and Large Head. Much of the page is heavily shaded—in black and a variety of greys. The few areas of untouched paper appear to shine. The sense of light radiating from inside the windows of the house is magical. The long diagonal stripe of the high, thin waterfall is equally luminous.
One drawing, inscribed with the words, “She felt her arms again”, exemplifies how a work of art, as well as expressing the feelings of its creator, can act as a mirror in which a viewer can read entirely different feelings of their own. I happen to know that the drawing was intended as an illustration to my translation of Andrey Platonov’s retelling of the folktale “No-Arms”. After undergoing many trials and saving her son in a desperate battle, the heroine longs to embrace her husband, from whom she has been separated for many years. She thinks she can’t, because she has no arms, but then, because of her love, her amputated arms grow again—“as if from her heart”. For Liza Dimbleby, however, this drawing illustrates how she feels when, after a period of creative sterility, she recovers the ability to draw. Liza’s understanding is, of course, at least as valid as mine. And in the end, perhaps, it all comes to the same thing—as Liza has just written to me: “How from deep lack, loss or void, darkness and negation, from the Black Hole, something can grow, even two strong arms, through the power of love and imagination.”
The introductory leaflet concludes, “There is violence, darkness and grief in these drawings but there is also the unspeakable of love…. The obstinate work of love, without which even the most seemingly violent of these drawings might never be begun, that breaks through muteness, and makes a drawing.” Kossoff’s tender drawings of his sleeping mother and son exemplify this, as does Kathryn Maple’s A Memorial to My Father—which Maple refers to as “a drawing which turned into a painting”. The colouring is delicate—mostly grey and pale green—and the detail is complex; the fineness of the marks allows a great density of imagery. Faces emerge—some clearly, others only faintly—from a fabric of minuscule shapes. I see this work as representing the fabric of an individual life, woven from those her father remembered and who in turn will continue to remember him.
“Drawing the Unspeakable” is on display at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, until 27th April
