Petleys

To see more information about this exhibition, click here

Petleys is proud to invite you to our annual Exhibition of Drawings. This year we have combined new and old, with works by Paul Bartlett, Edward Beale, Francesco-Guiseppe Casanova, Marc Chagall, Saied Dai, Paul Ceasar Helleu, Bob Jackson, Augustus John, Peter Kuhfeld, Henri Lebasque, Henri Matisse, Ambrose McEvoy, Sir William Orpen, Roy Petley, Pablo Picasso, Vicente Romero, Charlotte Sorapure, Edward Stotts, Caspar Pieter Verbruggen, Lucy Kemp Welch, Antony Williams, Robbie Wraith, Martin Yeoman.

In the world of Art today there is so much confusion as to what is Art. For instance, drawing to some has been redefined as mark making. To me this is far too crude an expression to describe something that not only involves the total coordination of your eye, mind and hand but also all your feelings about what is in front of you and indeed around you at a specific point in time. Mark making by contrast is the difference between signing your name and taking a thumb print. What sparks people off into drawing? In my own case I remember really enjoying it from the age of five. The desire grew inside me I think and later, by looking at books that had great drawings in them, with one book in particular on Rembrandt that fully opened my aspirations. Within that book, it had the all-time great drawing of ‘Two women teaching a child to walk’ which was probably made in under a minute.

What an example! Maybe though it would mean nothing to you if you have no feeling for it. Those of us who wanted to draw when we were children would come back to a drawing such as this and sit and wonder at how someone had managed to capture something so fleeting and convey such life. In my middle years I am still in the same state of wonder at that drawing and so many others, and will be till the day I die. So if you are young or if you are old and have been reading this, stop now and sit for a very long time and look at Rembrandt’s great drawing reproduced opposite.

Then come and see the exhibition and enjoy the works of acknowledged Masters in drawing from the 19th and 20th century alongside people who draw today. Make your own mind up on how far, or even how not so far, we have got with this great and strangely undervalued art.

by Martin Yeoman