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Mark-Making: Perspectives on Drawing

GOMA, Glasgow until October 20th
Four stars

Six artists, buddied up into duos across three rooms, draw from their very singular world-views in terms of drawing, somehow finding a through line running through them all. Both Erica Eyes and Jonathan Owen draw from found images, Eyres copying from photographs in 1970s naturist magazines, Owen’s ‘eraser drawings’ rubbing out movie stars from classic film scenes, so all that is left is the background. Where Owen’s images are existentially bereft, with Eyres, the joy comes, not through sex, but the everyday mundanity of chilling in the pool, waking up and smelling the roses and of barbecues in the sun.

France-Lise McGurn’s coloured line drawings of bodies in motion bend, stretch and dance their way through the frame with a classicist retro air. In Contrast, Lois Green's postcard-sized black and white still lives peers surreptitiously into unoccupied but lived-in rooms, where dirty dishes and rumpled bedclothes have been left in haste. Only in two pieces is that gaze returned, peering out onto trees or a river at dusk.

Gregor Wright’s digital drawings on large flat screen TVs leant against the wall are dreamy collages of pink-hued worlds, where triangles, moons and all-angles shapes orbit around each other into some fifth dimension. His sole crayon drawing does likewise. Ross Hamilton Frew’s opaque amalgams of word and image are reimagined from secondhand books, their grey shapes resembling modernist album covers while words pulled out at random form evocative Zen-noir narratives sketch out what probably won’t be the last word on pen, ink and everything inbetween. 

The List, May 2019

ends


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