‘what is drawing?’

‘when two surfaces touch?’

‘that could be painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking…’

‘maybe, but for drawing it requires no further explanation…

any surface with another surface touching it – 

which could be the trace of lead from a pencil, a swipe of cement, a collaged leaf,

onto anything from paper to brick, from cardboard to steel…’

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a pencil line unwinds across the paper,

it offers only itself, 

a line executed more by blindness

than evidence of something in the world…

but this contact between mind and hand is evidence,

shrewd, calculating evidence of a moment, 

when time and action unite 

with minimum interference, minimum expectation,

other than pencil on paper doing their most basic of tasks –

to touch each other –

 

and we watch this line,

tracing it back and forth  –

it refuses to be committed to memory,

its scrawl both familiar but unique,

informing us of that human urgency,

to show that someone was here…

 

— Phyllida Barlow, 27 December 2022

 

Written on the occasion of Joseph Beuys: 40 Years of Drawing in response to the artist’s landscape drawings