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

Royal Drawing School