Lonely Long Feet

About

“The idea is: Don’t stop. So, I’ll draw. And they’re goofy drawings. I mean, just searching, and they’re germinating. My painting comes out of drawing. I couldn’t live without drawing. I know that. It’s constant. You scribble. You draw. Okay.”  Philip Guston, from Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, University of California Press (2011).

Drawing has been and remains a necessary tool for painters: it is the mediator between the world and the studio with a unique emotional and intellectual capacity to record or capture a seen thing or an idea, and a necessary backbone for the pictorial construction and aesthetic execution of a painting. It is, as Guston’s quote above implies, also intrinsic to a developing dialogue between an image/picture and the idea/concept that underpins a painting - a kind of consciousness within the making which is a part of the ‘painting’.

Although Kerry and Wilson are very different painters, the above is pretty central to the making of their paintings. In Kerry’s case, drawing principally finds, loses and reclaims an idea/image that sits on and in the ‘painting’, and by so doing creates a suspended domain of space that has a poetic charge. There is an emblematic quality to Wilson’s paintings. The range of shapes, patterns, minimal fields of colour, calligraphic design, density of colour, and decorative repeats are just some of the elements that are committed to the surface by intuitive drawing, like a first step, which is then ‘read’ and responded to, and which shows a layering of invention and reaction that can never entirely be predicted, like a game that has realised its own rules.