The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art - Susan Owens in Conversation with Claudia Tobin
Booking opens on Wed, 18th Sep at 12:00
Autumn Term, sees the return of the Royal Drawing School's Creative Conversations; dialogues between artists, curators and writers. Lectures are held on Wednesday evenings at the School or online.
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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.
'Crouching Tiger' Eugène Delacroix, (1839), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Credit: Gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix, in honor of Sanford I. Weill, 2013
Susan Owens is a writer and art historian. Formerly Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum where she specialised in British drawings, she now lives in Suffolk and mostly writes about drawings, landscape, history and ghosts – often in combination. Her new book is The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art(Yale University Press, 2024). Her other books include Imagining England’s Past (Thames & Hudson, 2023); Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape (Thames & Hudson, 2020), a Times / Sunday Times art book of the year, also shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Book of the Year; The Ghost: A Cultural History (Tate Publishing, 2017); Jonathan Richardson by Himself (Courtauld Gallery, 2015); and The Art of Drawing: British Masters and Methods Since 1600 (V&A, 2013).
Dr Claudia Tobin is a writer, curator, and art historian specialising in modern and contemporary literature and visual cultures. She recently curated Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors at the Garden Museum in London and has worked with numerous organisations on exhibitions and research projects including at Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, as well as with international commercial galleries and contemporary artists. Her recent book publications include a collection of Virginia Woolf's art writings, Oh, to be a Painter! (2021), and Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (2020). In collaboration with the Royal Drawing School, she co-edited Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices (2019). She teaches English literature and visual cultures at Cambridge University and is a Bye Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge.
Cover image: 'Crouching Tiger' Eugène Delacroix, (1839), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Credit: Gift from the Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix, in honor of Sanford I. Weill, 2013
Please note our Autumn Term lectures will take place in-person at the School. Places are limited and prior booking is required, entry will be denied to anyone without a ticket.