Nigel Hall

NIGEL HALL DRAWINGS

ANDREW LAMBIRTH

NIGEL HALL DRAWINGS

ANDREW LAMBIRTH

HALLMARKS: THE DRAWINGS OF NIGEL HALL

Andrew Lambirth

‘Drawing is seeing, thinking, finding, recording, connecting, stilling and distilling.’

Nigel Hall, 2004

Although Nigel Hall (b. 1943) is best known as a sculptor, drawing has always been of equal importance in his artistic practice. He makes observational studies, technical plans for sculptures, exploratory sketchbook notes and finished drawings for exhibition, but there is seepage between these categories. And although for Hall the boundaries between drawing and sculpture are likewise permeable, it should be said at once that his finished drawings are not preparatory studies for his three-dimensional pieces: they exist as autonomous works, and he regularly exhibits them.

Early training in stone carving with his stonemason grandfather exerted a profound effect on Hall’s drawing practice. Cutting a line in stone is all about the place where light meets dark, about making an edge and trapping a shadow. From the start, he defined drawing in these terms, and thus clearly rooted it in sculptural activity. Much later he commented: ‘I find it very difficult to draw if there’s poor light. I need good shadow and

delineation: the shadow actually establishes the form within its surrounding space.’ In Hall’s work, drawing and sculpture are parallel but closely interrelated activities. Drawings lead to sculptures, sculptures lead to drawings: it is the give and take, the yin and yang of his inspiration and his achievement.

Hall always carries a sketchbook with him and refers to it constantly, whether in the studio or not. Here he might make notes about sculptures, including practical things such as dimensions and a work’s relationship to the human scale, ideas for works not yet made, and drawings of things in the real world he wants to record. Also diary entries and more general thoughts. He tends to fill a sketchbook every couple of months. Blueprints or diagrams of the forms needed to make his sculptures are working drawings and these he makes on separate sheets. They tend not to be exhibited, although they are occasionally reproduced in publications on him and his work.

Conversely, Hall has fairly recently begun to exhibit his observational drawings, which had their debut at his 2011 Artists’ Laboratory show at the Royal Academy. There he made public the whole range of his drawing activities, from sketchbooks to landscapes and large

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