Since winning the John Moores Prize in 2020, Kathryn Maple has been working towards an ambitious new show, ‘Under a Hot Sun’, opening at The Walker Art gallery in Liverpool this February.  In this conversation, Kathryn comes together to discuss her work with artist Sarah Pickstone ( a previous winner of the John Moores Prize )  The two will discuss the ideas behind paintings, studio patterns and the importance of keeping paintings growing together, as well as drawing, which feeds into all of Kathryn’s work.   

Kathryn will also show images from ‘A Year of Drawings’, a new book and exhibition for which Kathryn made a new drawing everyday between January and December 2022. The works will be shown at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, London in March.

Under A Hot Sun: Sarah Pickstone in conversation with Kathryn Maple

This conversation between the Director of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, Dr Roberta Cremoncini, and the artist Paul Coldwell will introduce the work of Giorgio Morandi and reflect on his relevance to contemporary audiences. They will introduce the current exhibition Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation. Paul Coldwell has had a long association with both Morandi and the Estorick Collection, curating Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art (2006) and in 2021 he was invited to re-hang their collection of Morandi’s prints and drawings alongside his own work made throughout lockdown.

Reflecting on Giorgio Morandi: Dr Roberta Cremoncini in conversation with Paul Coldwell

The Royal Drawing School's Creative Conversations are dialogues between artists, curators and writers, curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, these lectures are held Wednesday evenings during term-time.

Drawing Year alumna Alice Shirley and Managing and Heritage Director of the Hermès Design Studio, Christine Duvigneau discuss the collaborative process between freelance artist and commissioning fashion house. The working relationship began whilst Alice was studying at the Royal Drawing School in 2010 and has continued ever since; Alice’s designs have been featured on silk scarves, beachwear and homewear. At the heart of the collaboration is a dedication to sustainability and social and ecological responsibility. Whilst Alice’s designs highlight endangered species and threatened habitats, Hermès is committed to preserving resources, supporting the regions in which its manufacturers operate and preserving its integral humanist values. They discuss the commissioning process, from brief to final product.

The Commissioned Artist: Alice Shirley and Hermès Paris

The Royal Drawing School's Creative Conversations are dialogues between artists, curators and writers, curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, these lectures are held Wednesday evenings during term-time.

British artist Daniel Crews-Chubb has developed an intensely physical, mixed-media painting style, for which paint is smeared with the fingers, scratched with a stick, glopped on straight from the tube, sprayed from a can, and mixed into sand or pumice gel. The combination of this ‘wild’ and experimental use of materials with historical subject matter is a recurring characteristic of his work. His abstracted paintings are currently on view at the Ashmolean in the exhibition ‘Ashmolean NOW: Flora Yukhnovich x Daniel Crews-Chubb’. Making new works for the show, Crews-Chubb was particularly interested in international pre-historic sculptures that depict non-human figures, such as deities. In his Immortals series, he has experimented with their postures and expressions to create his own fantastical figures. 

This in-conversation between Daniel Crews-Chubb and Ashmolean curator Lena Fritsch will explore the artist’s work with time for questions and comments from the audience.

Image: Daniel Crews-Chubb in his studio with paintings from the Immortals series, 2022. Photo credit: © T. Craig

TASCAM SD-20M

Daniel Crews-Chubb in conversation with Dr Lena Fritsch

The Royal Drawing School's Creative Conversations are dialogues between artists, curators and writers, curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, these lectures are held Wednesday evenings during term-time.

Alicia Foster, author of the recent acclaimed critical biography of Gwen John (Thames & Hudson) and curator of the accompanying exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester and Holburne Gallery, Bath, in conversation with Claudia Tobin. Demolishing the myth of the recluse which has often cut Gwen John (1876-1939) off from the art worlds of London and Paris she was part of, Foster has told a story of connection rather than isolation in her writing and curation, creating a fresh, more nuanced and deeper understanding of John’s art and life. In discussion, the significance of John’s work and life story in her day, and ours, will be explored and discussed.

On Gwen John: Alicia Foster and Claudia Tobin in conversation

Hear Scottish artists Lorna Robertson and Andrew Cranston in-conversation with Liza Dimbleby, discussing the role that drawing plays in their paintings and their wider artistic practices.

A Morbid Sensitivity to Surfaces: Lorna Robertson and Andrew Cranston with Liza Dimbleby

The subject of drawing is both huge and human-scaled. Men and women the world over have drawn for thousands of years on rock, papyrus, parchment and paper, and today the medium is more popular than ever. And yet we experience drawings intimately, one to one. When you look at a drawing you are taking a step closer to its maker because, for centuries, artists have thought with chalk, pen or pencil in their hands. If you think of painting or sculpture as the public performance, then drawing is where you can encounter the artist at his or her most unguarded: trying things out and wondering if this or that idea will work, experimenting, looking, dreaming, planning – catching ideas on the wing.

Drawing has always offered creative latitude. Artists have long turned to it to express thoughts, fantasies, traumas and emotions that would have been impossible in any other medium: whether Francisco Goya sketching his bitter insights into human nature, Henri Michaux recording his mescaline-inspired dreams or Yayoi Kusama drawing discomfiting ‘infinity nets’ in post-war US-occupied Japan. Taking Susan Owens’s recent book The Story of Drawings a starting point, in this in-conversation, Susan and Claudia will explore drawing’s role as an arena for experiment and candid expression.

The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art - Susan Owens in Conversation with Claudia Tobin

Since 2004 Eileen Hogan has pioneered a unique approach to portrait painting by including an oral historian in her sittings. The triangular relationship - artist, sitter, questioner– sets her subject in animated conversation rather than frozen under the artist’s gaze. As Hogan concentrates on drawing, she is able to tune in and out of the dialogue yet is free from initiating or entering into it.

The life story methodology followed by the oral historian centres each subject’s professional life in an autobiographical context beginning with forebears and moving from childhood onwards while also encompassing important contemporary national and international events as they occur as well as those personal to the sitter. What Hogan absorbs seeps into her knowledge of and attitude to the sitter, affecting her depiction of them.

In 2019 Hogan was commissioned by Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), Oxford, to paint its then Principal, Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian newspaper. Her composite portrait of nine images reflects a period of exceptional volatility, including the 2019 General Election, the proroguing of parliament, Brexit negotiations, the explosion of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, the 2020 America election and its aftermath. Early sessions took place in Rusbridger’s office before being derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic and moving online, with Rusbridger based in different home environments, his hair growing shaggier, and, once, wearing layers of clothing seated in a freezing gazebo he constructed at LMH in order to greet new students safely. Final sittings took place in 2022 in Hogan’s studio. The composite portrait of nine images now hangs at LMH. The oral history sessions continue and are accessioned into National Life Stories, an independent oral history charity housed in the British Library.