Feeling as language
by Kadish Morris
During the late Gothic period, Cennino Cennini was said to have stressed the importance of mastering drawing as a prerequisite to engaging with other art forms, believing that all young artists should devote a year to the medium before venturing into painting or sculpting. French Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres declared that drawing was ‘the probity of art’, believing that line and contour reigned supreme over other compositional elements.1 So, what is the function of drawing today? In a world where five billion photographs are taken daily, drawing perhaps provides a rare opportunity to linger, to ruminate and reflect. The works in Drawing Biennial 2026 reveal the ways in which drawing can stimulate our curiosity by inviting us to take a closer look at the things, feelings and ideas that we have too long been distracted to entertain.
Simple observations, everyday moments and objects become intriguing when they are transformed into tender depictions, as in Okiki Akinfe’s Snack for the Way Home (2026). The pencil-on-paper work of Dixy Chicken fast-food packaging is minimal and straightforward, but it is its unfussiness that makes it so impassioned –a reminder that beauty can exist wherever you choose to project it. Peter Davies’ pixelated Henri-FantinLatour-inspired For those we love (2026) is similarly warm-hearted. The vase of flowers spread across a hand-drawn grid makes each square, up close, appear as its own standalone hue. These two still life works translate the everyday into carefully crafted novelties, with each detail carefully and lovingly rendered.
The more celebratory works spotlight objects, iconography and even people that are easily overlooked. Kimathi Donkor’s ink-on-paper work Big Bang Theory (2025) reveres afro hair for its helix form. The interwound coil spring shape that is foundational to biology is presented here for its ‘infinitesimal and the cosmological’ quality.2 Blackness is treated as sublime and worthy of awe in a world that is intent on subjugating it. Blackness is equally powerful in Richard Mark Rawlins’ Jet July 28, 1966 + Jet October 2, 1952 (2025), which depicts Trinidadian–American activist Stokely Carmichael and the Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie from two different
covers of the famed Black magazine Jet. Rawlins’ coloured portrayals are earnest, evoking a sense of loyalty. Ideas of honour reappear in Bunmi Agusto’s Drawing a Fantastic Tropic (2025), which depicts an assemblage of sentimental belongings. The artist’s Lagos upbringing is commemorated through this display of cowries, palm trees and braids. Her lines are clean and steady, suggesting that these items are rich with meaningfulness.
Tracey Emin recently remarked that ‘drawing is an alchemic language’, a statement that resonates with Minoru Nomata’s PAVILION (2025).3 Rendered in coloured pencil and watercolour, a kind of mushroom-shaped cloud is born from a large explosion. Wholly eerie despite its luminosity, the image is striking – a sign of ultimate destruction that communicates a feeling indescribable through words alone. Existential stress – albeit more personal than global – is also present in Olivia Sterling’s It soon goes (2025) in which a hostess, who holds three trays of red wine, spills some onto herself. As Sterling notes, the vivid work represents the feeling of watching political developments unfold and awaiting collapse; you can sense the nervousness and urgency. In Marcus Cope’s The Dance (2024), unease is even more overt, as two figures seemingly engage in a fist fight. Cope’s colours are muted: dingy greys, greens and blues.
The relationship between drawing and humour is long-standing – be it through cartoons, caricatures or satirical illustrations. The intrinsic value in fun and fantasy can provide a respite. Hedonism and pleasure pop up in Tai Shani’s Cult Children (2026) with text that reads ‘Sleep by Day. Party by Night’ in an alluring crimson red atop a wooden background. The candle burning in the centre has all the appeal and seduction of an open invitation. Alexander Gorlizki’s You Never Really Know (2022) is subtly comedic. Bringing together elements from ‘Mughal miniature paintings, Western botanicals, medieval manuscripts and cartoon iconography’, it comprises small intricate drawings assembled on top of a beaming yellow background. Each element tells its own curious mythical tale: the pattern work, the subtle use of colour, forces you to pause, probe and engage in magical thinking.
In the twentieth century, drawing played a significant role in Surrealism – from automatic drawings to frottage –capitalising on the medium’s associations with freedom of expression and experimentation. This feels ever more needed now that ‘hyper-surreal’ AI-generated images proliferate online at unimaginable speeds. Drawings such as Robert McNally’s Felix Nussbaum (2023) are indebted to Surrealist traditions that surface the subconsciousness and materialise the absurd. The lumpen, skin-textured form that brings about pareidolia is bizarre but beguiling. The figures that appear in Shadi Al-Atallah’s gothic Yours and Mine (2025) are trippy too. There is a macabre quality to the drawing, from the pallid figure to the exposed entrails. Its varied textures – smooth, jagged, slow, quick – shows how different sensations can coexist on a single page, resulting in a sense of ambiguity.
There are many works that show the imaginative potential of works on paper. Each artist’s idiosyncratic methods, movements and manipulations prove just how expansive drawing can be. The geometric structures in Nicolas Feldmeyer’s Zurich (2025), for example, have a dreamlike quality and are misty and sharp at the same time. Feldmeyer’s manipulation of light, which turns smooth lines into serene monoliths, demonstrates drawing’s inherent capacity for world-building. Frank Bowling’s Red Spine (2025) is another inspired study of light, movement and materiality, the gradient of red creating an emotive landscape, darkened in some places, bright in others. It honours the artist’s long tradition of Abstract Expressionism and accentuates his fluid style of ‘stains, splashes, spills’.
Endnotes
1 ‘Le dessin est la probité de l’art’, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Pensées (Paris: Editions de la Sirène, 1922), p.70.
2 All artist quotations are taken from their supporting statements for the Drawing Biennial 2026.
3 Tracey Emin, ‘Marking 25 Years of the Royal Drawing School’ (2025), available at royaldrawingschool.org/ marking-25-years, accessed 11 March 2026.
4 Bridget Riley, ‘At the End of My Pencil’, London Review of Books, Vol. no. 31, issue no.19 (8 October 2009), available at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n19/bridget-riley/ at-the-end-of-my-pencil, accessed 11 March 2026.
When technology shifts, visual culture does too. Still, the spontaneity of drawing will always hold value, especially if the human touch becomes a scarcity. Bridget Riley once described drawing as an inquiry, a way of finding out’.4 In an increasingly suspicious world, where fiction and fact are becoming harder to distinguish, the ancient practice of drawing allows for genuine contemplation. A drawing simply asks a question – about life, the world or one’s self and is always open for dialogue.
Kadish Morris is an editor, writer and poet. She is a critic at The Observer and her writing and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Frieze, Art Review, The Financial Times, Vice, Tate ETC, RA Magazine