Ginny Grayson, Chris is Feeling Sick 2008 charcoal 104.5 x 73 cm
When I first encountered Ginny Grayson’s work it reminded me of the force and focus I had admired for years in other artists – I thought of the penetrating density of Lucian’s Freud’s paintings, the doggedness and tenacity of Frank Auerbach’s drawings, the intensity and conviction of self-portraits by Mike Parr.
When it comes to making of marks on a surface, most artists appreciate the significance of drawing as means of transposing ideas, emotions and physical energy with an immediacy unmatched by other media. It is a deceptively simple act yet at its best demonstrates a very human need to engage, observe, interpret and respond to the physical world with extremely high levels of concentration, imagination and abandon. This is what I see evidenced in Ginny Grayson’s work, briefly considered here.
A New Zealand born artist, Grayson currently lectures in the Drawing Department at RMIT where she gained a Masters of Fine Art in 2004. She has been working as a professional artist, exhibiting and collaborating with other artists for over ten years. Her work resides in both public and private collections around Australia, America and New Zealand. To date her practice has explored notions of identity, transience, memory and loss. Grayson has worked across media, including drawing, video and performance art (although my focus here is on her drawings).
Ginny Grayson, No Conculsions Drawn - Self Portrait 2008
In 2008 Grayson was winner of the Dobell Prize for Drawing, one of Australia’s most prestigious competitions run annually by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
As a painter I have always accepted this sticky medium as a means of embodying life experience in the sense of capturing thoughts, feelings and decisions over time. Well there is no sign of paint in these works but that makes them no less potent – instead they demonstrate the foundation for these properties is developed through the traditional skills of observational and ‘life’ drawing – practices which characterized the atelier system of art education for most artists of the Modernist era. It is the human eye and hand co-ordinated in relation to a real human or still life subject perceived and responded to in real time and space – and usually developed over years of practice.
© Ginny Grayson
In the West, the relevance and usefulness of this training has been questioned and sometimes undermined by systems of art education that have had to account for more contemporary media and experimentation through performance, conceptual, video and cross-media art. From a historical perspective, however, these practices are relatively recent (post 1950) and their prevalence (or achievements) have not displaced or announced the death of traditional skills of drawing and painting.
Untitled 2007 charcoal 65 x 50 cm
The continued opportunity and scope afforded by marks on paper, as shown by Grayson, is that the hand-made mark may continue to elicit unique responses and provoke shifts in our experience of the physical world. Mark-making represents a form of human resistance and persistence in the face of technology and a world where human interaction and engagement is saturated by virtual media.
The following works are from an exhibition of recent drawings held at Harrison Galleries in Sydney, Australia.
Bat (dog) display #44 2009 mixed media 49.5 x 56.5 cm
Bat (dog)- display #28 2009 mixed media 50 x 56.5 cm
Bat in the Kitchen 2008 charcoal 72.5 x 55 cm
In these works, it is difficult not to linger over the evidence Grayson’s hand leaves behind of her conceptions, fragmented thoughts, re-directions and observations. The graphic nature of this work reveals areas that are vigorously erased, knocked back and almost ’silenced’ in parts. Erasing is often linked to an artist’s willingness to be destructive for the sake of discovering something new, something raw and fundamental in their creative process..but unless it completely obscures the preceding marks, erasing and obscuring them often only accentuates their resilience in the face of doubt and uncertainty. An enduring sign of its relation to contemporary human experience.
For more insight and works online visit:
Ginny’s website: www.ginnygrayson.com
Ginny Grayson at Harrison Galleries
[...] Ruiz (an excellent artist in his own right) has a nice write up on his blog this week about the drawings of Ginny [...]
I can see the resonances with Auerbach, with the focus on the process of seeing and drawing, and also that stripping bare that Freud practices (although, I think that Grayson suggests sympathy for her subjects in these examples, something that I think Freud often lacks for his). Giacommetti too, comes to mind here, the kinetic tangling of lines and the sense of constant revision.
Drawing though, as you rightly say, is very much in the shadow of more “contemporary” approaches to art, and especially here in the UK, where the conceptual is still very much king.
And if Rochelle Gingeras and Rochelle Steiner are to be believed, in their discussion on the work of Glenn Brown, drawing is rarely used now as a preliminary grounding or approach. Instead Photoshop and other design software is being utilised as a shortcut by many contemporary painters.
Drawing as finished artwork, especially the figurative, I believe is sadly the poor relation to more fashionable forms…perhaps because of its difficulty? Yet, for me, drawing can still approach something visceral, stark and revelatory in art, and with an immediacy that requires no curatorial explanation. From your examples here, Grayson, undoubtedly deserves our attention and respect.
Hi Nick yes I think there you are right in your hunch about the difficultly of this kind of drawing being one of the reasons perhaps why it is given something of a wide berth in much contemporary art. And yet I am happy to say there are signs of it being given more prominence and recognition here in Australia; There is currently a show on at MCA Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney called, I Walk the Line: New Australian Drawing, which seeks to show case traditional mark-making as well as explore drawing within the context of performative works that feature the production of marks as well as art objects…see the work of Dorota Mytych or Leith McGregor as fine examples..
As for Ginny Grayson. “Visceral, stark and revelatory”…Yes, they are excellent words to describe the kind of drawing she does and that I wish we could see more of in terms of the spirit, discipline and resilience it entails.
Hi Paul;
Ginny’s work also reminds me of the South African artist William Kentridge – the same searching out of the form. Bravo to you for you blog and most especially for your art. I have been a silent fan of your work for sometime now after “Stumbling Upon” it as I searched for other figurative abstractionists. I am only now delving deeper into your blog to read the past entries.
B