In today's Observer, Sir Frank Bowling R.A. has fingered the overlooked source of drawing’s alchemistic powers – its symbiotic relationship with… things-made. We filch this important mini-essay and honour its publication with an example below of an unsung craftsman’s draughtsmanship that Matisse would have envied (- as published in the Telegraph Magazine when the King made his first visit in 30 years to his tailor). Sir Frank first:
“I always maintained that I knew nothing about art while I was growing up in Guyana. But now that I’m a very old man looking back, I realise that arts and crafts – drawing, measuring, cutting out and making – were very much part of my childhood. It all starts with my mother, Agatha Elizabeth Franklin Bowling, who was a dressmaker, a seamstress and milliner. She had six Singer sewing machines in the house, pleating gear, embroidery machines – the whole operation. And as a small boy, it was my job to brush the mosquitoes from her legs while she sewed right through the night. I watched her hands, the needle finding its way through fabric, making a pattern out of nothing.
“When I was a teenager, my mother put me to work as a huckster – a travelling salesman – cycling on a carrier bike along the coast of Guyana, hawking fabrics and threads, and taking orders for dresses and saris. I was deep inside the world of material, of texture and colour, and the way things are made. And then she sent me to work in my uncle’s cabinet-making workshop as an apprentice, and that’s where I learned about geometry: how you could put a circle in a square, or use intersecting triangles to make rock-solid furniture. I picked up carpentry skills too from the road workers who came and went through my mother’s yard, and from them I learned how to use a theodolite, a level.
“At school in Berbice, we did technical drawing: plan and elevation, the logic of the drawn line, how it could describe a three-dimensional thing on a flat surface. Three-dimensional drawings were my forte. We were also made to draw the map of Guyana freehand. Over and over. You were supposed to get it right; that particular coastline, those particular rivers. I never quite did. It left a kind of agony in me that I did not understand until decades later, when I was in New York making map paintings and found South America appearing in the stained canvas on the floor – unbidden, unplanned, just there – and the feeling that came back was that childhood agony, that trying and trying to get the shape right. Suddenly, the shape that had tormented me was the shape I was claiming. Drawing the map of Guyana freehand as a boy turned out to be one of the most important things I ever did. I was drawing before I knew I was drawing. I have been drawing ever since.”
observer.co.uk/culture/art/a…