Faculty of Art Media and Design
11 - 14 July 2006
Hosted by the Advanced Centre in Drawing (a.c.i.d) at the Bristol School of Art, Media and Design, Drawing Quarters 2006 ran from the 11th - 14th July and offered an opportunity for attending delegates to work in the company of a selected artist for an intensive four-day period. The event took place in dedicated studios at the Bower Ashton Campus with each artist leading a group of practitioners through a four-day project designed to explore certain aspects of drawing; as a means of recording information, exploring ideas, developing visual language and building narratives.
Drawing Quarters 2006 also included presentations by all Quarter Leaders and studio seminars to introduce ideas related to drawing practice. On the final day of the symposium, the four Drawing Quarters came together in an Open Studio exhibition at Bower Aston. The event concluded with a symposium summary.
Introduction to the Artists:
Ann Christopher
Ann Christopher studied at Harrow School of Art and at the West of England College of Art. She was elected as a Royal Academician in 1989 and is known for her large scale sculptural works many of which have been commissioned for public spaces. Her numerous exhibitions have resulted in many works in national and international collections. Ann's work deals primarily with the expression/externalisation of internal responses to both visual and emotional stimuli with many of her ideas being developed through drawing whether as the starting point for the realisation of works in other media or as artworks in their own right. Ann exhibits and curates nationally and internationally and is currently represented by the Redfern Gallery, London and Ann Kendall Richards Inc. New York.
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'Drawing to me is the most intimate form of creativity,
it is certainly the most direct in the traditional sense of marks on paper
- but here tradition leaves
the scene because I believe drawing can be expressed through video, lines in the sky, marks in the mud -whatever medium the creator chooses - much
more immediate than sculpture, drawing is about freedom.'
Roger Conlon
Roger Conlon studied Fine Art at Bristol Polytechnic and the Royal Academy Schools. He is currently working as Associate Dean at the Bristol School of Art, Media and Design at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Roger has sustained a deep interest in the practice and teaching of drawing and painting throughout his career. Alongside the creation and exhibition of his own work he has dedicated much of his professional life to the development of a pedagogic approach to drawing based on the belief that drawing is natural activity related to the sense of touch and desire for order.
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The urge to make a mark is as old as the first drawings
in a cave and as fresh as a child's crayon marks on a wall. Our marks
can turn into drawings and
those drawings into perceptions about our world. To create drawings is an exciting and natural thing to want to do for all of us. Drawing is not something to
put behind a frame, it is a living thing, a thing to do that has a place in the way we live today.
Making a mark starts with a sense of purpose and is linked to two important human characteristics -our ability to feel, in all its meanings, and our desire to
order our thoughts. This workshop will focus on the exploration of touch as the starting point for a series of responses to the world around us.
These will explore aspects of illusion and expression which will later be developed in the presence of, and away from, the initial subject. In this way delegates
will explore the development of a visual vocabulary which, initially, draws on an intuitive response to a range of environments and experiences. This vocabulary
will be related to the conventions of drawing that form the history and traditions of Western illusionism. Initial work will use dry, monochrome drawing media
though any range of drawing materials is welcome for the three days, as indeed are all ranges of skills and abilities. Delegates will be set a few simple tasks
before the workshop to focus thinking on aspects of 'touch' and 'order'.
Peter Lord is co-owner and Creative Director of Aardman Animations Ltd, which he co-founded with his longtime collaborator David Sproxton in 1972. As a director, Lord has been honoured with two Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Short, the first in 1992 for "Adam" and again in 1996 for "Wat's Pig". He has also earned BAFTA nominations for "Adam", "The Amazing Adventures of Morph" and "War Story".
In 2000, Lord co-directed with Nick Park and produced Aardman's first full-length feature, "Chicken Run", starring the voice of Mel Gibson, which was a commercial and critical smash.
Under the Aardman banner, Lord produced the first feature length film starring the beloved duo from their Oscar-winning short films, the cheese-loving Wallace and his faithful canine sidekick Gromit. "Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" was released in October 2005 to critical acclaim and won the Acadamy Awards Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
Peter was at the time of the conference involved in the making of Aardman's latest feature film "Flushed Away" then in production in LA. It was Aardman's first foray into CGI and was released in November of 2006. Peter is also heavily involved in the development of future feature films.
This workshop will focus on the development of narrative structures and strategies for the storyboarding of an animated feature film. Initially students will undertake a series of life drawing exercises designed to develop confidence in drawing for animated action. This work will then be developed through the conceptualisation, development and realisation of a storyboard for an animated feature.
Emma Stibbon
Emma Stibbon studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths and has recently completed an MA Research in Fine Art degree at the University of the West of England. Emma exhibits nationally and internationally and has more recently been working on a series of images in which she depicts the dynamic sites of the City of Berlin.
Emma's bold black and white charcoal drawings and woodcuts explore ideas of Utopia through the dramatic representation of carefully selected sites. Her interest often centres on the physical experience of place, and the visual impact this may have on the viewer.
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'Observation plays a fundamental role in the initial development of my
work. I work from drawings and photographs made on site, and the connection
with the actual place is important. However, when I translate this into woodcut, the image mutates into a more fictitious form; I tend to project my own
experiences and memories onto it.'
This workshop will focus on how artists collect and gather information on site and then re-interpret this information through the drawing process in the. studio. Taking the location around the Drawing Centre as a basis for work, delegates will work both outside and back in the studio. The emphasis of the workshop is to explore the depiction of location, and how a 'reality' becomes a focal point for self-expression and creativity which transcends and enhances the experience of the initial location.
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