After using drawing as the main mode of expression for my art for well over 10 years, a couple of years ago I just stopped. I didn’t stop making art, so to speak, but it felt like drawing, my way of drawing, had not only run out of steam, but relevance.
The reasons for this are plenty, and complex, and I’m happy to discuss them elsewhere, as they relate to a whole matter of things, but at the moment this would be a messy digression.
To cut a long story short, from September 2018 to September 2019, I worked on a film which was a fictionalised account of my own experiences. During that moment it felt like the last move I had left to make, if art was a strategy game. But in life, it felt like a gigantic full stop, from one thing to the next; for, despite perhaps it’s awkward introduction, when I finished ‘Wall, i’ I thought “that’s what I’ve been trying to fucking say for all my adult life!”.
It was a massive version of what all my drawings had always been: long meditations that would take me months to produce, and leave me (on a smaller scale) thinking the grass (of the none-artist) was greener on the other-side.
Now, every word that isn’t about the huge current global, societal issues, feels like it is walking a tightrope of accusations (the accusation of ‘privilege’ is a specifically prevalent accusation, as we can always see one for what they have, and we don’t, over our tech-mediated field of comprehension). But it has been precisely these current crises, in our streets, on our screens, and crucially within our inner dialogues, that suddenly made drawing relevant again. Suddenly it felt apt to try to finds compositions to depict the Now, through drawing. Yet, like always, I am a slow worker. So the works below are my ‘works for the Covid 19’ era, thus far.
1. A New Spring has Sprung.
2. Nausea
3. All of Your Gods are Pounding my Head’
John B Ledger 