Thinking Aloud -The Big Drawing Show 2009
24 April, 2009 - 20 May, 2009

Why is drawing increasingly becoming a lost art? This art world in which we live is sadly becoming a brave new world of bad installation sculpture, ordinary video art and an audience far too frightened to turn around and say ‘this is shit’, for fear of being labelled ignorant. Whilst so many artists rush to the most modern and cutting edge tools to convey what are more often than not the tiniest ideas, drawing is dismissed as incredibly old fashioned (a fate worse than artistic death in this slick Sydney art world, supposedly).

Drawing is a true and fascinating form of the visual arts. It is extraordinarily honest and leaves the artist bare to the eyes of a viewer. It provides small hints that tell us much about an artist’s instincts and their subconscious. Because a sheet of paper and a pen doesn’t cost the earth, an artist can lose themselves in their drawing, find lines and ideas for further work or destroy their crap as instantly as it was made. Call us old fashioned here in Surry Hills but we haven’t yet jumped on the new media bandwagon. Give an artist a pen, some charcoal, oil sticks, even magic markers for all I care, so long as you make them leave their bloody camcorder at home. (I don’t want to see Francis Ford Coppola’s etchings!) So, in the month of May, Ray Hughes Gallery will present the next instalment in its biannual drawing shows, ‘Thinking Aloud”.  Every two years the gallery calls together the vast stable of artists, inviting them to - quite visually - tell us what’s on their mind. What is happening on an artist’s drawing board is quite often a sign of what is going on in the greater studio. Frustrated marks, fluid tidy packages of lines or something completely new, a different approach to drawing, the use of a new material. When an artist turns the page he can do precisely that with his whole practice.This month Evan Hughes Gallery will present its very first Big Drawing Show, “Thinking Allowed”, and may there be many more.

The biannual drawing show at the Ray Hughes Gallery serves the purpose of reminding artists in our stables and further afield that the art of drawing can be as diverse as is desired, can be vibrant, can be fun, and especially in these slim times, won’t leave too big a hole in a collector’s pocket. Most importantly the show serves as a means for my father, and now I, to be able to exhibit on a large scale an art form which has been a very important part in the development of both our eyes: for drawing is the most direct path to an artist’s ideas.

Evan Hughes