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CREATIVE SCHOLARSHIP Mark Stiles, Ruskin and Drawing, Gallery East Clovelly Sydney Australia June 2011
This exhibition presents some of the work I have done over the past five years. I had been taught to draw many years ago as an architecture student but let it lapse, and I started drawing again partly to renew old pleasures. I was also writing a thesis at the time on John Ruskin, the nineteenth century English art critic and social reformer, and this was another and very important prompt to begin drawing again. Ruskin believed drawing was central to any good scheme of general education, and his books about it, especially The Elements of Drawing (1857), were written primarily for ordinary people, and only secondarily for professional artists. As always with Ruskin, there is a larger moral purpose at work; drawing from Nature is about learning to understand masses of men as well as groups of leaves. How this is so is brilliantly argued in the second lecture of The Elements of Drawing, where Ruskin insists upon both good government and individual liberty, principles he sees at work in Nature under other names. The heart of Ruskin’s advice in drawing from Nature values closeness of observation more than facility of hand: attending to the visual facts of a leaf or a tree, particularizing it as much as you can, and considering how its appearance is affected by shadow. I have followed these two points above many others Ruskin recommends, such as never drawing anything that is polished, or avoiding all very neat things, or countryside divided by hedges, so it is truer to say that my work is inspired by Ruskin rather than being a faithful demonstration of his principles. Nevertheless Ruskin is behind every drawing, even the more abstract ones; paradoxically Ruskin cherished abstraction over literal accuracy, as representing the “essential elements of the thing to be represented … so that wherever we please we shall always have obtained more 2
than we leave behind “. Drawing the leaves and twigs I found in my local park over and over again confirmed the truth of this for me many times. There is a third point Ruskin makes about drawing from Nature, the Law of Mystery, where he says that “nothing is ever seen perfectly, but only by fragments, and under various conditions of obscurity”. This humbling reminder is true of human affairs too: Incomprehensibility [is] a perpetual lesson, in every serrated point and shining vein which escape or deceives our sight among the forest leaves, how little we may hope to discern clearly, or judge justly, 2
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851), vol I, chap XXI, sec 10