Stephen Farthing RA

This drawing demonstrates just how skilled Laura Knight was at looking at something and then making, not a copy of it, but an interpretation of what was going on.

As a drawing, the important thing is that Dance imagined it all, but then he put in this big shadow that runs through the middle of the drawing, which gives it a physical credibility.

Drawing doesn’t have to be some big demonstration of skill, it can be drawn onto any convenient surface as an aid to memory, or literally as a way of amusing oneself.

This drawing was made as part of the preparation for a large picture called ‘The Field of the Cloth of Gold’. It’s looking not only at the shape of an individual’s head but how a crowd of heads might form.

Here we have a draughtsman staring at a bone and trying to draw it as accurately as he can. It has little or nothing to do with the imagination or art, it’s somebody practising the craft of drawing.

This is about trying to understand how these bones work together to produce the mechanical effect that allows walking, trotting, running and galloping.

It’s a rather carefully, beautifully made drawing that’s made by combining the imagination with a knowledge of the way things really are.

If you start to look at drawings not as a series of lines on paper but as a meeting of a series of lines and a white metaphysical space, I think you get a better idea of what a drawing is.

This drawing has been so heavily drawn that it has ceased to be a drawing, because the paper is no longer playing an active part in our understanding of the drawing, it is merely a support.

I suspect it’s not really a painting. I think it’s a drawing. What is a drawing? It’s an idea. Drawings are full of ideas, they’re not necessarily full of resolutions.