In this film, artist and teacher Charlotte Verity reflects on what drawing can show: you can’t hide in it, and the marks you make often say more than you expect. A painter whose work is held in collections including the Arts Council of England and Sir John Soane’s Museum, she has exhibited widely and taught for many years. Moving between memories of early drawings and time spent teaching in places like Kew Gardens, she speaks about choosing what to look at, and how to make something on paper that feels true without trying to copy the world. She returns to drawing as a practice of close attention, and to the “wonderful feeling of being at one with what you’re doing.”
Biography
Charlotte Verity studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1973-77 under William Coldstream, Lawrence Gowing, Patrick George, Noel Forster and Euan Uglow amongst others. She has had several solo shows with Anne Berthoud (1984, 1988 and 1990), Browse and Darby (1998, 2002 and 2007) and more recently at The Garden Museum (2018). She has been included in many group exhibitions including the Whitechapel Open, Hayward Annual, John Moores Painting Prize, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and at the LA Louver Gallery in California. Her work is in many private and corporate collections including Deutsche Bank, Tate Education, University College London and Arts Council of England, and her portrait of Margaret Richardson hangs in Sir John Soane's Museum. In 2010 Charlotte was the Artist in Residence at The Garden Museum, London. She has been teaching at the Royal Drawing School since 2001.
You have to really concentrate. You can't draw casually. It is looking, staring, questioning, and noticing. And all of those things enrich one's life, whether you're doing anything about it by drawing or not."
Charlotte Verity