John McDonald, SMH 5 December 2014
One cannot travel very far in any discussion of drawing without coming across a famous statement from the great neo-classicist, Jacques-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: “Drawing is the probity of art.”
“Probity” means both “correctness” and “goodness”, but also “moral integrity”, which allows us to imagine Ingres was saying: “to thine own self be true”.
This Shakespearean motto could be applied to any of the artists in Drawing Out, the inaugural Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial at the Art Gallery of NSW. Curator Anne Ryan, has taken landscape as her theme, and it’s an appropriate starting place. Landscape is one of the few areas in which Australia may be said to have contributed something original to modern art’s global patrimony.
Image: Performative drawing: Gosia Wlodarczak (left) drawing directly onto a window at the AGNSW overlooking the landscape of Woolloomooloo for the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2014 at the AGNSW, with Michael Harding and Lily Lui.