Drawing as an approach, or approaches to drawing

As a visual artist, my instinctive approach to any project is to see if there is a way that I can visualise it; is there a way that I can make it happen again on a single sheet of paper as a drawing? The invention of a formal equivalent to the question in mind can be a first step in a process of understanding. This act of making something happen again as drawing is more useful to me than representing it as drawing. I am too much a child of modernism not to feel a commitment to the integrity of the object itself, the alternative approach would be to treat the drawing as information and therefore a secondary experience.

For most projects that I have thought about or have undertaken, I have come up with a substantial collection of drawings. These plot the development of an idea and often provide the actual data that I will use in carrying it out.

In some cases a drawing is a means of answering a rhetorical question, “does this happen and if so, how”. Certainly the work that I have carried out on Coastal and Estuarine Strategies has been a means of interrogating the approach and exploring the implications for myself and by default for others.

Between March 16th and April 22nd 2010, I put on an exhibition of drawing at The Cut at Halesworth in Suffolk. This was called “Drawn Towards” and was an opportunity to show for the first time a selection of large scale drawings directly related to my way of life and projects that I have undertaken in Suffolk. I laid the emphasis upon the role of drawing as a means of comprehension. In particular I have taken the opportunity to put my more recent coastal work in the context within which it was conceived and make it accessible to the local and professional community with whom I have been collaborating.

Drawn Towards an exhibition of drawings by Simon Read.

The Cut Arts Centre
8 New Cut
Halesworth
Suffolk
IP19 8BY

I have always regarded drawing as my way of coming to grips with an idea on the assumption that if I can generate a satisfactory graphic solution, I shall have reached a more complete understanding of its subject.

These works are culled from the last thirty years of my practice and are the first opportunity that I have taken to pull them together as a single group.

More recently, I have become preoccupied by the immediacy of our environmental predicament. For me, drawing represents a way into this debate. Through it I feel able to negotiate the huge range of specialist data that might otherwise reduce me to a sense of impotence.

I am convinced that it is possible to lay claim to these issues as cultural phenomena and to develop strategies for how they can be possessed
in a wider public context.

This exhibition was an opportunity to discuss the role that the arts
can develop in articulating environmental change.

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Light reflecting off a dark surface-Gibbous Moon 1992

Anybody who has worked consistently with photography cannot escape becoming sensitised to the subtleties of light. Every stage in the photographic process is the result of reflected or transmitted light.

Further to this is the capacity of any plastic medium to interpret light in its own terms. This is something that has driven a great many artists on the understanding that to give dumb material a quality that it does not possess is a kind of alchemy.

In 1989 I made a very large drawing for a travelling exhibition called "The Tree of Life" an initiative of the environmental organisation, Common Ground with the support of the South Bank Centre. The drawing was of an oak tree in a strong raking light; it was called "Growing/Dark" and referred to a conundrum I once read that plant cells divide more rapidly in the dark than in the light and that therefore a tree grows by default towards the light.

The idea that the principle of phototropism is a conceit, I found very intriguing. The writer and naturalist Grant Watson succinctly described this as "Growth by Contradiction" in his book "Walking with Fancy" 1943.

In making this drawing I was intrigued by what a limited medium like pencil could accomplish and it spawned more explorations into a kind of inert luminosity.

The drawing here is the last drawing of a loose series and was prompted by the observation that its dark powdery, rocky surface is not very reflective.

In fact the intense silvery light is all of the sun's illumination that is reflected back to the earth.

This rather unscientific conundrum was sufficient to prompt me to dwell upon the idea of light reflected by an unreflective body.
By allowing the moon to be in its gibbous phase it becomes a moment in time and a means by which I could avoid stereotype.

The Escape of the Royal George 2004

In the year 2000 I was given the exciting opportunity of putting together a selection of work spanning my career to date for the Wolsey Gallery in Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich.

This continued as a travelling exhibition over the following two years that changed its content according to the venue. When I first got to know Christchurch Mansion, the redoubtable Rebecca Weaver, then exhibitions officer, took me on a grand tour of the house including the attics, cellars and all those rooms not open for various reasons to the public.

One particular room that had degenerated to being used as a furniture store amazed me, for right in the middle reaching almost to the ceiling was a model warship from the Napoleonic Wars in a huge vitrine.

This was built by a French Prisoner of War and was of the !st rate, 100 gun, HMS Royal George. When I saw the model, it had become quite dilapidated and there had already been plans to liberate it and to make it the centrepiece of a celebration of the association of Nelson with Ipswich, however, for the present it was the mouldering centrepiece of a collection of stackable seats, foldaway tables and sundry battered antiques.

My instinct at the time was that we must find a way of liberating the ship. This matured in 2004 with a proposal called "Behind Closed Doors", to work with a group of fellow artists to activate those parts of the building that are not accessible to the visiting public.

My first thought was to find a way of projecting the image of the ship out into the adjacent room via a lens fitted into the keyhole. My aim was that the ship could have a fantasy of escaping the confines of the room and maybe also the vitrine.

These drawings were made to explore the idea.

Pencil on paper, 8ft x 5ft

Nearer to the sea than the sky 1988

Through the 1980's I worked on a series of panoramic photographs of the entrance of the River Deben from just offshore. These were made in under a huge range of light, weather and sea conditions. The photographs automatically blurred the boundary between the sky the sea and myself in a small boat. The act of scanning up and over from horizon to horizon and the passing of time was something that I took as a challenge to encode as drawing. Much of my thinking with drawing is focused upon asking a dumb medium to encapsulate qualities such as time, light or space, that it cannot have other than in its own terms.

Orfordness Lighthouse 1987

Frequently we find ourselves anchored near Orfordness where at night the single blinking eye of the lighthouse continually glances over with occasionally the faint loom of the Shipwash as an echo. This drawing came out of hours sat in the dark watching the rotating light, perhaps waiting for the barge to swing safely to the tide before allowing myself to go to bed. It also came from my repeated wonder at how a drawing bound by time and space can learn to transcend itself. Literally I have drawn out my thoughts as a speculation to make what happens momentarily again and again, something that I can explore and make tangible over as many months.

Designs from a commission for the floodwall on Poole Town Quay 2001

Poole Fish "Memory and the Tideline" Stranded fish: these are all from my working drawings for a series of 14 bas-relief circular granite copestones to be built into the new flood defence on Poole Town Quay.

The theme I developed was that memory in a tidal environment could be seen as what is left behind by on the strandline.

I used this as a framework to explore aspects of the history of Poole.

The drawings are all 1/1 scale and to the size that they would subsequently be carved.

The work was commissioned by Poole Council and supported by the Environment Agency. Two Bass taken from a stone about the D Day landings. When I asked a student of mine from Normandy what fish would be typical around the coast in June, without hesitation, he said "Bass"; these would the collateral damage of blast.

A Conger is a worryingly vicious looking creature, anyone who has handled one will know that even when helplessly out of its element it can give a nasty bite, so it is trodden round gingerly.

A very large Turbot represents the times of plenty and the boom and bust character of the fishing industry in Poole. Over the centuries there have been successions of fisheries all of which extremely successful for a while, but eventually failing because of over-exploitation.

The coat of arms of Poole has a heraldic dolphin, a typical, mythical creature in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. I proposed to carve this as though found washed up dead on the beach, a truly extraordinary specimen making the fabulous credible. This was not included in the final work.

Motor Vessel Jacoba 1980-2010

In 1980 I went to Rotterdam and bought Jacoba, a Dutch Barge and brought it back to England to serve as a home and workplace. We have been based in Woodbridge since that time and over the years I have gradually transformed her to our needs.

In 1980, in order to get a handle on what I had let us in for, I did a drawing of her at a scale of 1/10. Since then I have revisited this drawing to plan alterations and modifications, because it was never really valued, it became quite dilapidated acquired the patina of neglect. It also echoed the changes in our lives even to the extent that I encouraged my infant son to contribute his own thoughts of marine architecture to it.

Mounting it and showing it here is an act of retrieval, acknowledging its value as a document.

Bentwaters Airfield 1997

RAF Bentwaters, near Woodbridge, was built during World War 2 for the USAF, primarily as a casualty airfield to which damaged aircraft could be diverted. After the war it remained in American hands until the end of the Cold War, when it was unceremoniously handed back.

After a period of uncertainty a private investor put in for planning permission to set up a civil airport. Although this was consistent with the national policy to alleviate pressure on Heathrow and Gatwick by setting up more regional airports, it was inconsistent with the local plan.

I was deeply involved in a campaign to oppose the plan and as a part of this I decided to make a drawing/map of the site to explore its landscape in the past up to its character at the time of the closure of the military facility and to think about how it might be used should we be successful and the airport bid fail.

The outcome was that we won the case, but there was very little interest in seeking any alternative use for the site other than light industrial, agricultural and a source of hardcore for the building industry.

In this way, the longest runway in Europe is slowly being dismantled.

The future for Orfordness according to the Suffolk Shoreline Management Plan 2010 and some of its implications

Above: Animation of drawing development

The current Shoreline Management Plan is a gift to the imagination since it opens up the potential for radical change but, tantalisingly, does not elaborate upon the consequences. The timetable for change is broken down to epochs: from now to 2025, from 2025 to 2055 and from 2055 to 2105.

The further away the change the more it will be lost in a mist of speculation. Since what happens or is allowed to happen along the length of Orfordness will have major implications and the consequences hugely uncertain, I decided to play god and make a drawing that enacted the speculative changes according to the predicted timescale.

In doing this I wanted to reflect upon the possible effects and the pre-emptive measures that might have to be undertaken such as a tidal protection to the south of Aldeburgh and a more resilient wall for that part of Sudbourne Marsh opposite Slaughden. Although for me this is a dispassionate exercise, I acknowledge that it is much more than this for those whose homes and livelihoods could be at stake.

My first step was to accept the loss of Orfordness Lighthouse, followed by an exploration of the implications of a controlled breach at Slaughden, the anticipated need for a breakwater to prevent the loss of shingle beach from the front of the southern end of Aldeburgh and Fort Green, reinforcement of the river walls directly opposite the breach and attention to the threat of tidal incursion into Aldeburgh via subsequent failure of the defences to Aldeburgh Marsh.

Although in the first instance I allowed Sudbourne Marshes, opposite a potential breach at Slaughden, to flood, seeing that this would most likely continue south as far as lower Orford and Gedgrave Marshes, I realised that it would be unacceptable and therefore reversed the decision in favour of more substantial river defences at the point of greatest stress. I did however allow Aldeburgh Marshes to flood since they are below sea level with the proviso that the southern part of Aldeburgh would need protection.

The breach at Slaughden would eventually influence the flow south to Orford, with the result of increased siltation. The Butley River would possibly keep the entrance at Shingle Street open, but not so easily navigable since there will be an increased tendency for shingle to accumulate making the entrance narrower and perhaps the frontage of Shingle Street itself less unstable.

This much I know and the rest I shall guess 2009-2010

My purpose here was to get the area covered by the current Shoreline Management Plan for Suffolk on to one map so that I could explore its implications and see more clearly how a decision made on one stretch of coast would impact upon another.

My method was to put the topography, bathymetry and tidal flow together, add the preferred options for the area between Covehithe and Harwich, set up a north easterly storm on a rising tide and see what would happen.

The map is made on the principle of "this much I know, the rest I shall guess" with an emphasis upon the need to ground the guesswork.

Although this is a speculative exercise, through it I feel much more familiar with the exercise than I would have done by just attending the public consultations and reading the reports. More details ...

A map of the River Deben

A map of the River Deben to explore its systems and susceptibility for them to fail 1999-2009 When Posford Duvivier and the Environment Agency unveiled the first estuary strategy for the River Deben in 1999, it became clear that there was very little public awareness of the terms of reference for the report, nor was there a great understanding of estuary systems.

At the time had agreed to take over the task of representing the River Deben Association in environmental matters relating to the river, so making sense of the Estuarine Strategy became my job.

In the first instance I could not trace any large-scale maps that related the river to its defences and surrounding landscape and also gave its floodplain. So I decided to make my own.

All of this information existed but was only retrievable from a wide range of sources; from admiralty charts, OS maps, Environment Agency Indicative Flood Plain Maps, and aerial surveys, all of which needed to be cross-referenced and "ground truthed".

By doing this I felt better equipped to enter into the debate. The map is pretty accurate and remains a useful tool to the present day. Any changes on the river or additional information have been added to it as appropriate. More details ...