Liza Dimbleby
- Academic board member
- Faculty
- Alumni, 2005
Biography
Liza Dimbleby began drawing and painting while studying in Russia in 1989, and completed a doctorate on Russian Thought at the University of London in 1996. She later studied on The Drawing Year at The Prince's Drawing School (now the Royal Drawing School) in 2004 and has taught there since 2005. Liza is now also a member of the School's Academic Board. Her book on walking and drawing in cities (I Live Here Now) was published in 2008. She gives regular talks on drawing at universities and art schools in Scotland and London and has recently spoken at conferences in Glasgow, Moscow (2012) and Paris (2013). She lives and works in Glasgow.
On drawing
My city drawings are a way of walking and looking and noting. They are an attempt to pierce the resistance of the everyday, to catch its rhythm and see into the life around me more fully. There is an energetic intensity that drawing in the city demands. It is only when this energy reaches a certain pitch that the sort of transformations that drawing can make can occur. The places that you have draw in intensely are never the same again. You can walk through them but a sort of distillation has occurred, and you are walking through a new reality, the reality of seeing through your drawing. While you are drawing, it can seem that you are merely stabbing into the chaos, or increasing it, or getting lost in it; but something can get in among the lines, that you are not aware of at the time, and returning to the scene, you experience a seeing-into more alive than your ordinary observation of the city.
