What is it about?
A account of how an older artist has responded to drawing the ageing process. This is not an examination of how to draw the external appearance of the body as it ages, it is an account of how the feeling process of ageing is coupled with memory. The human body is regarded as an extended mind or container for thought. As such it becomes a landscape within which ageing experiences are preserved and a platform on which imaginative constructs can be built.
Featured Image
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Ageing is central to the human condition and is often examined from the point of view of medical expertise. It is though also something of mythical significance and is deeply personal, every human being experiencing it in a unique way. An artist facing the fact that he is now over seventy and that his work needs to maintain relevance, has been developing a conversational practice that allows him to explore the process of ageing through the things he draws and makes. This work is important as it reminds us that there are always other ways to think about that feeling tone that we inhabit that we tend to think of as consciousness.
Perspectives
This publication has allowed me to feel that an artist's viewpoint can be accepted alongside more academic or medical understandings of the human condition. As a visual artist what I do has to be translated into words if it is to be published in articles such as this and the process of translation has been a very rewarding one, reminding me that every language is very specific in its ability to communicate and in terms of what it can communicate.
Garry Barker
Leeds Arts University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Drawing age, Drawing Research Theory Practice, December 2020, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/drtp_00043_1.
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