Matthew Collings – How do Painters Paint by Drawing?

Paintings by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, for all their apparent looseness and frenzy, are highly ‘drawn.’ Ones by Rothko less so. Drawing in Malevich, Mondrian or Barnett Newman is different again – the Constructivist tradition is not at all merely rational or merely mathematical. What about the deliberate unreason in Hilma Af Klint’s paintings with their diagrammatic drawing whose shapes and divisions were dictated to her by spirits? How does drawing work in Albert Oehlen’s paintings, Jacqueline Humphries’, Amy Sillman’s and Charlotte von Heyl’s (all contemporary figures; whose work you can see in Tate Modern)? Drawing in a painterly context is a complicated matter. There’s a lot of it but it works in different ways. The traditions go back much further than contemporary and modern art. In this illustrated talk Collings will look at connections between painterly drawing now and its roots in historic periods of painting, from Byzantine art to Impressionism, to the present.