Guest Workshop: Cathy Lomax, Drawing with Light

About

Lomax often uses projections to initiate and shape her work, the illuminated image acting as a transition point between film and drawing. In this workshop she will examine different ways that photographs and found images can become the source material for original drawings, with a particular focus on drawing from film.

We will start the day by looking at artists who use techniques such as tracing and projecting to create work that connects with its source material while imbuing it with new meaning, such as Gary Hume and Andy Warhol. We will go on to look at how to focus attention on the structure and essence of a subject by using the minimum of detail, notably with outlining and grisaille, by examining work by Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Marlene Dumas and France-Lise McGurn. Often drawing and painting from photographs can result in stilted looking works, we will be at looking at drawing materials that can be used to imply fluidity, thereby adding movement to a static image as well as considering the way that overlapping drawings and drawing in sequence can create illusions of movement.

Participants will have the chance to draw from photographs using a number of different methods and materials. We will have a wide range of images on hand that can be used to initiate drawings, but participants may like to bring physical and digital (on a USB stick) versions of images with them.

Biography

Cathy Lomax is a London based artist, the founder of Transition Gallery and the editor of Arty and Garageland magazines. She is currently researching the role of makeup and artifice in the creation of the Hollywood female star image for a PhD at Queen Mary University of London. Lomax’s paintings and installations assimilate the seductive imagery of film, fame and fashion, juxtaposing it with personal narratives and the everyday. Her particular interests are femininity, masquerade and the way that popular culture is constructed, consumed and related to. Since 2009 she has been recording the films she watches in an on-going Film Diary series, works from which have been shown in numerous exhibitions including the touring exhibition Misdirect Movies (2013), the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2017), and a solo show at Yantai Library and Art Museum, China (2018).

Lomax has MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, was an Abbey Painting Fellow at The British School at Rome in 2014 and won The Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2016. Her 2017 solo exhibition The Blind Spot is profiled by Matt Price in The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting. Recent exhibitions include Star Bar, Broadway Cinema, Letchworth Garden City (ongoing), The Immaculate Dream, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2019) and Dear Christine, Vane Gallery, Newcastle (and touring) (2019).

www.cathylomax.co.uk

Instagram @cathylomax