Essay by Pierre Ouellet on Paul Young's drawing in The Grain in the Light

Paul Young

The Grain in the Light A Project Lifeworld E-Publication - 2019

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Paul Young - The Grain in the LIght ISBN Published in 2013 by LIfeworld E-Publications 72 Ellsworth Avenue Toronto - Ontario - M6G 2K3 e-mail:

Distributed in Canada by

Distributed in the United States by

A Project Lifeworld E-Publication - 2019 Project Management and Design : Pierre Ouellet

Paul Young circa 1964

The Grain in the Light Texts by Paul Young Fraser Sutherland & Pierre Ouellet

Photography Pierre Ouellet

With an Introduction by Pierre Ouellet

High Definition Drawing Most art is made up. 90% of the artist I’ve known don’t work from reality as I do. They see reality and they draw it - and they make sketches and they think thing about it - and they do stuff - but they’re assembling something that is - in essence - a fiction to begin with - and they accept that. It doesn’t mean their can’t have realist elements and fidelity to some sense of how things are but it is fabricated.

But when you’re talking about high definition - you’re in another league - and its not a superior league I’m not trying to one-up anybody - but it’s just a different discipline and in that discipline you are absolutely tied to what you are looking at. You have to be there and if you want to work on it for more than a few hours, you got to come back the next day at exactly the same time and in the same location and not move and not change and just watch what’s going on.

In high definition there are no lines - you have to make it up - that means that you have to look at something and read the grain as though it moves around and changes in the light and see the grain changing and draw it. At first – this is extremely demanding and time consuming.

Now I’m an expert so I work fast and I invented all sorts of short cuts - where I can make a pass at a piece of paper and see that in the nature of that pass there was a reality, a nascent thing about to happen and all I have to do is blow the grain out or blow the grain in and suddenly I’ve changed the nose of a bison to the nose of a seal cause they’re different. When you’re learning it - as I was teaching it - you have to go very very slowly - and you can’t lie. You have to see exactly what you’re looking at.

Now as I say, you get older you get more experience you learn faster short cuts to get to where you are going. You can’t spend the rest of your life with a 2 H pencil going like this, it’s just not worth it.

The reason I was successful in learning from all these people and associating with them at reasonable levels is that I could draw well enough and I was brave enough to not already be trapped into conventional realism. This is even before I got into high definition realism. But for example, when I started drawing all those animal, I wasn’t doing cute animals in a forest with little bees and everything - I was tearing the animal apart and doing the same thing to the animal that I was doing to the nudes.

There were pieces of the animal completely missing - a beak might suddenly find itself looking like a leg over here - and the eye again in crossing space and going from frame to frame - and they saw that I wasn’t treating things as a conventional realist. That for all my limits - the truth is I was trying very hard - in what was essentially an ancient tradition - to be up-to-date - and to be as discursive as they were about the adventure of inventing a new way of seeing things. It was not a problem for me - it was just something I had to do.

Falling women

I just watched the sun go down behind its veil of trees.

Only a fool would attempt replica in our garden.

Maybe Jackson Pollack had some grasp of our random light and its shattering of presumptions .

Light is funny that way, not like things at all.

People call me a realist.

What a compliment.

They are blind and kind.

Bless them.

Of a Nature Drawing by Paul Young

Fraser Sutherland

Fence - Albion hills

OF A DRAWING BY PAUL YOUNG They don’t make this paper anymore.

Less paper than porous limestone, less chalk surface than earth and sky from which it drinks.

It draws in the pencil, too, edge and point, line and shade, drinks it deep and grows a woodlot far within itself trunk, branch, and leaf, a motioned feathering reaching up and wide as the world, quick as the land, robust delicate garden.

Below, the artist snaked a country fence, below that, left only white.

But which is denser, richer – woods or white? An entire religion’s been founded on such nothingness, the strength of absence.

Bole, flower, bud rise from its ground, their details depend on it but how would we know blank or fill without this paper’s grainy weave?

The fence glows, crooked as God, a luscious creamy depth inside shape.

This fence is a form of knowledge.

The drawing’s unfinished, the artist says.

Well, the land’s unfinished, too.

Anyway, what does he know?

Paper tells him what to do, and all the rules of its making.

The picture waiting for us was made all along, ready to be found.

The black and white’s real as paint though he says he knows sweet-all about colour.

He doesn’t need to, when his black’s every colour and his white’s this warm.

Crouched low, propped against the vertical both the drawing and us, watching each other.

“Are you having fun?” the artist asks.

Nature Drawing by Paul Young It has to be quick - in a sense - because the light is only going to hold for about 10 or 15 minutes - before things actually start to look different. In a number of my drawings, I’ll just start the drawing and then stop - and then change positions and do something else - but the next day I come back and I take the drawing I did first - and of course I make sure that I land in exactly the same spot at exactly the same time - and then I can get on with what I started - and it might take 2 or 3 trips.

There’s something about the reality of light that can’t be manufactured later. You can invent lighting effects - and you can invent trees and you can invent all that other kind of stuff that assembly line painters do - but it never rings true. What rings true is something that is absolutely unique and is only there for a fraction of time - and that’s what’s fascinating and it is replicable day after day after day -provided you are in the same place - looking at the same thing - from the same angle and all that kind of thing.

I’m really trying to eliminate myself in a way - and be absolutely faithful to what I am seeing. Because - if I believe that that is amazing - and I’m holding my eye in one condition of seeing - and it still looks amazing - and it looks like I could possibly accomplish it on a piece of paper - then I’m engaged. But I’m not playing tricks - and I’m not inventing things that aren’t there. That’s absolutely what I don’t do - I’m very rigorous about how and what I see - but in the end I have to seal curiosity at a certain point and just say OK - I am going to surrender to what I actually see and if it is as interesting as I think it is, I should be able to draw it and not invent things. Of course that’s an ideal that you strive for.

I actually put my eyes out of focus so that I can better see the grain in the light and so as I move my eye into focus - I am conscious of where my focal depth really is - and I need to get back to that particular state of seeing. So I’m always making a compromise between where I’m fixing my focal distance and the new focal distance which it the piece of paper itself - and that’s a totally different distance. So you’re moving back and forth from one to the other - because you’re trying to be faithful to one condition of seeing - as opposed to just willy-nilly wandering around. It’s quite difficult to do.

I deal with this necessary shift - not by inventing things but by leaving things out.

Drawing isn’t like painting. It’s really traffic across a space as much as it is into space - so I’m trying to put everything in that is essential to what I’m thinking about - and leave out things that are peripheral and aren’t part of what I’m actually trying to do.

Obviously - there is a certain amount of editing that does go on - but I don’t edit the truth itself. That is - if I’ve decided upon a course of action and a condition of seeing - then I’m committed to that - and everything else can be edited out except what I’ve fixed my mind on. I really don’t go in and make stuff up - to me drawing is an act of surrender. It’s almost like I’m not there - in a way - I’m challenging what and how I see - and I try to get myself out of it.

Paul Young – Interview with Pierre Ouellet - Perch Lake - NH – October 2011

Dawn on Jeffers lake

The Grain in the Light We are all taught in art school that color has three domains: the domain of hue that is whether it is red, green, blue, etc. - the chroma loading: that is to say how really intense is the color - like day glows are intense - and tone or value which is the grey scale, how dark is it, how light is it? Well there is a fourth domain and I guess it is a sub-domain of tone, and that domain is the domain of grain, the grain of light. It is an event in the eye that is only known to super-realist and it has to do with looking at something and deciphering the grain you are actually seeing. I mean if you take a photograph of an orange in black and white you can still tell its an orange but what are you reading is the grain of the light that is bouncing off this thing and when you get the grain right, you don’t need color - you are now really in high definition.

So when I discovered that it was possible to do that, that changed everything because now I could really enter the world of high definition realism on my own terms and capture the light that was coming off things, capture it in the way that photography can’t - because photography is always filtering through lenses and processes and all that kind of stuff so it tends to chunk all the grain together and unify it - but in the eye its quite different - the grain is constantly moving and it has a wider range of possibilities than a camera.

The grain you can see if you learn to reproduce it on a surface is very high definition which meant that I could compete with people like Andrew Wyatt and the great realists by doing exactly what they did and that is - don’t make anything up, just draw what you bloody see, I never made anything up in my life, I am not that kind of an artist. I’m nailed to my seat and I am looking really hard at what is in front of me and

Then you got a piece of paper in front of you and you got a bunch of burnt stick called charcoal and you rub it around and then you go “that’s that grain” and “that’s that grain” and then if it’s a really tight grain then you got to get a really sharp pencil and you got to go inside and close the grain up and if it’s a wide broken grain then you got to put the stuff on differently so that it stays broken and doesn’t come together.

So you have to work with the materials you got, you change paper, you got to change what you are doing because one paper is really good for some things and if I am going to draw a brass, or lets say a chrome teakettle I am going to get a really fine piece of paper - I got a curved mirror in front of me - I got to see everything on the right kind of paper. If I am doing landscape, I am going to use rough paper, cause I can always close up the grain later, but getting the grain that you see as the sun comes up over that line of trees - that requires great speed, it is only there for about a minute and half then its gone - or it’s changed into something else. So that’s where the drawing thing changed from being something you do before you paint to something you do instead of paint and you end up with something which is cheaper to make, easier to make and to anybody who loves drawing - interesting.

PY

Paul Young’s Grain in the Light In the beginning there was… the scratch - the mark – the trace – even perhaps the sign – as line or curve pointing – either to itself or toward infinity – opening or closing the surface – defining through gesture into absence the chronotopic image of existence itself.

All children learn to draw either in an organized fashion - at the most basic stage of their formal socialization - or as a solitary activity intended at the very least to develop – in the name of creative self-expression - manual dexterity and some early version of hand-eye coordination – a necessary preamble to the objectifying mastery of the world to follow. And it is the memory of the expressive potential and power of the marking of surfaces that constitutes our earliest form of identification – delineating objects or events in time and space as well as their latent and manifest relationships to each other and to us.

The images on the walls of Lascaux and Chauvet in France – the Mogao Caves in China – the cave temples of Ajanta in India or the cave paintings in Gua Tambun in Malaysia and the Chusma Painted Cave in Southern California are all expressions of our common humanity – of the persistence of vision acquired and dispensed – like sacred fire - in the earliest moments of collective existence. And while these haunting inscriptions are most often read as depictions of daily life and historical accounts of memorable events, they also represent our earliest efforts at controlling the world through its formal organization into objects and categories – things and moments - a form of visual incantation anticipating literate systems of signification implicated in the necessity of naming itself.

And while this backward glance might seem to confirm the practice of drawing as one of our fundamental not to say primal human intuitions – it does very little to explain the fate and destiny of drawing – its virtual disappearance from the public gaze - in our late modern era and in this sense – turns a blind eye to the work of artists such as Paul Young. One need simply consider the official rhetoric of mainstream institutions and galleries such as the AGO regarding the value and significance of “works on paper” within the larger context of their collections and displays.

First, and perhaps foremost, there is the widely-held notion of drawing as a “preparatory “ exercise to some other more significant visual expression – painting - sculpture - fresco and so forth. And, corollary to this sentiment, the need for attribution by experts of the countless unsigned sketches and drawings available across the world according to school – period – geography and the perceived aesthetic affinities and discrepancies of their stated provenance, an exercise likened to “the detective work” required to solve “cryptic puzzles.”

Second, one should consider the economic imperatives and necessities of these acquisitive practices whereby, for example, the limited resources of the Gallery are enhanced by donors and benefactors enlisted in the search and purchase of “significant or important” works according to various schemes of public and private emphasis and strategies of ownership. In other words, another system of evaluation and classification is imposed on the “works on paper” according to various institutional designs and agendas. It is in this manner, for example, that a gallery may choose to acquire and display works from a wide range of schools - beginning with the Italian School, followed by the Dutch and Flemish, French, Swiss, German and Austrian, British, Modern European and North American Schools, as one published taxonomy would have it, rather than specialize in the much more expensive and elusive “masterworks on paper” of a selected group of artists or period.

Third, the category of “works on paper” is itself suspiciously vague because it only accounts for one of the basic characteristics of the work, namely the surface upon which the markings occur and even this material dimension encompasses a wide range of possibilities from vellum laid, or wove paper to illustration board and other such rigid surfaces.

While the previously aforementioned attitudes and practices constitute the practical nexus of how “works on paper” are thought of and presented to the public, the most significant oversight resides in the reluctance to accept and display drawings – as fully legitimate works of art – on their own merit leaving the dubious and often self-serving influences of market and individual taste to dictate their value, both aesthetically and monetarily.

While this temporary blindness is often explained away in material terms – burnt charcoal and drawing paper are inexpensive – most such drawings are monochrome – everybody can draw - and so forth - this dismissal exposes the entrenched latent biases of a market system rather than addressing the originality and quality of the work itself. According to the same logic – black and white photography – a medium which allows for profligate duplication – should be worth less than its colour counterpart, and so it would go.

These brief thoughts allows us now to consider the work of Paul Young – one of the great Canadian drawing masters – from a new vantage point that might acknowledge his near invisibility in the Canadian art market while focusing on both the thought and the practice of the artist himself – all the while allowing the works that preceded to resonate with the conviction of a singular vision that transcended its own mastery to reveal the world anew – as all great art does.

By his own admission, Paul Young, was introduced to art at an early age through his uncle Walter Yarwood, a member of the Painters 11, and he regularly visited his uncle’s studio as well as the studios of his uncle’s good friends, including 1960s Canadian art icon Harold Town. Not only was Paul able to watch these artists at work, but he also was exposed to their spirited discussions and the accumulated experience of their artistic projects. It is most likely from these early mentors and a few contemporaries such as Graham Coughtry and Robert Markle that Paul fashioned the elements of a philosophy of seeing and doing that would animate his lifelong drawing project.

Like most young students first entering the Ontario College of Art, Paul initially started a career as a painter, preferring portraiture and still life as genres which best suited both his temperament and the nascent acuity of his emerging interests and vision.

Feeling that his drawing skills required significant improvement to support a painterly enterprise, he endeavored to develop a relationship with what he saw that would be, in so far as possible, both literal and faithful to the subject. Faced with the problem of such demanding execution - distinguishing for example between the various types of fur in his animal drawings - Paul developed his own personal ways of seeing “the grain of light” as a way of deciphering “what something was made of” through understanding its grain before manufacturing it by hand.

The grain of light sought by Paul Young is, according to the artist, a sub-domain of tone – the domain of grain – the grain of light. It is “an event in the eye known only to super realists” who have taught themselves to decipher the grain in what they are seeing. This discovery, through endless hours of applying charcoal to paper – allowed Paul Young to develop what he refers to as “high definition” drawing – a mode of drawing “absolutely tied” to what the artist is seeing.

And it is at this moment that a fundamental axiom of Paul Young’s drawing crystallized into a lifelong commitment to rendering reality on its own terms, literally – and without making anything up and only leaving out that which is not essential. In high definition drawing there are no lines to refer to – in fact there are no lines in the world - only places where things end and others begin – where one deals with the abutment of tone and grain as it moves around in the light to be drawn as it changes. The results are stunning and the effort tremendous.

Of course, through these discoveries and developments, other aspects of Paul’s draftsmanship also continued to develop and define themselves. His under-drawings became increasingly precise – a practice he borrowed from watercolorists - serving as very detailed maps locating everything in its proper place and serving as the anchor for the literality of the realism that Paul was committed to - prior to rendering. This allowed the artist to – in his own words – adopt a specific condition of seeing – that is to say – a desired level of definition – in the process of rendering his drawing.

The use of calligraphy in the works also came to take on new and sometimes unexpected expressive roles. In some cases, it served to further highlight the “high definition” areas of the drawing by engaging the eye in the type of movement employed by the artist – in and out of focus – as he reads the grain of light in a particular condition of seeing necessary to execute the vision he has committed to. At other times, rather than surrendering to the reality of underdrawing – calligraphy becomes a form of intervention which tries to capture – through the power of unconstrained gesture – the initial intuition or insight which was the basis for the picture itself. And this form of calligraphy can find expression in tone and grain as well as the instinctive line which – according to the artist – always has more life to it than the careful one.

Yet, in spite of everything, the calling of the work is haunted by the shadow of the artist’s profession itself – articulated to a nasty and unfair bit of Irish sophistry- to wit – “those who can do – those who can’t teach,” a revenge exacted for over a century now in the aid of a literary thug’s displaced rebellion against the all too real oppression of class – gender and other manner of social structure. In fact, Paul Young’s teaching at OCA for 30 some years is a virtual extension of his creative vision shared “live and in person” with thousands of potential draftsmen and other artists – “Remember that everything starts with a drawing” he says - a brilliant summation of the early destiny of drawing in the expressive order of collective life. And the inspiration is embodied in the practice itself – drawing alongside his students – illustrating and at times intervening gently as much to support as to inspire in the re-rendering of a difficult line or the shading of a recalcitrant contour. Taken this way, drawing itself becomes a perpetual moment in the larger engagement with the lifeworld – a dialectic of understanding through seeing whose regenerative synthesis results – at the very least – in a deeper and more insightful sense of existence itself. There is magic in this acute pursuit of vision and the relentless obsessive dedication required to continuously summon the energy and inner strength to faithfully and accurately render that which is in front of us – without invention or artifice – as truth and testimony of one’s presence in the world.

And so, as the practice unfolded, so did its ethical implications and imperatives – both in the work and in life itself. Once a particular field of vision or subject matter appears exhausted to the artist, he moves on rather than continuing to mine for fame or fortune the already known – already said and already done. He states: the last thing you want to do is to become a slave to your own inventions… so you reach the end of the journey and you say: ‘Thank you very much – next?

From animal drawings to nature – stopping to experiment with new techniques in musical drawings, collages and resident squares – which emanate from an entirely different order of self-expression - before returning to the beloved figure – now on a scale and with a mastery and intent far beyond those of the earlier works. In “the large nudes (26x40),” as they have come to be known, the artist allows mood to enter the composition through a figurative gesture that “moves across the space and defines it in a largely abstract way.”

Working purely in the “service of a compositional idea” now, “figure drawing is projected into an abstract realm” somehow remaining still faithful in “accuracy and fidelity to the subject.” This is the mature work – not an end in itself yet– but a summation - a pause and a culmination of technique and personal power - coal dust as light across the grainy vellum of a quiet yet extraordinary life.

Pierre Ouellet - August 2012

Paul Young - 1968 - photographs by John Reeves

Paul Young - 2011 - photograph by Pierre Ouellet