Drawing Works

Drawing is the new black, reckon Ails Denholm and Gregory McGee, who are giving over the front room of The ArtSpace to this art form for a month.

"Drawing Works is the title for the provocative austerity of our latest exhibition, presented by the Please Do Not Bend group, " Greg says.

"The Tate, the Royal Academy and MIMA have recently held exhibitions on drawing; Loughborough University's Tracey website is entirely devoted to the academic and artistic discussion of it, and the hugely successful annual Big Draw, set up by Quentin Blake, invites us all to do it.

"So long overlooked by its big brother, painting, drawing is now enjoying an extraordinary revival among a new generation of artists.

That drawing is the 'new cool' is evidenced by the profusion of events, prizes and exhibitions celebrating it, and as The ArtSpace loves to spot significant trends in the art world, we're showcasing the work of three York artists with the aim of showing how diverse the practice of contemporary drawing can be."

From the Please Do Not Bend roster come Belgian-born Catherine Scriven; the ever-experimental Kruse, soon to exhibit at the (deviant) Arts Festival in Sweden; and Nathan Chenery, who was short-listed for the Mercury Arts Prize in 2005.

"The revival in drawing has been gathering pace for some time, with competitions and spreads in magazines and at least two websites dedicated to it, " says Nathan.

He and his fellow artists are looking to stretch the possibilities and media of drawing.

"What we're trying to do is to push the debate still further, to say 'This is drawing; this is drawing' and maybe do some drawings that other people may not consider to be drawings, " says Kruse. "That's fine by me, as we can then debate it."

Her latest works could not be more elemental in their collaboration between artist and nature.

"Kruse uses natural forces and processes to make drawings that are part art, part alchemy, " says Ails.

"Her drawings at ArtSpace were made outside, often in storm-force conditions, using the power of wind and rain to move ink on paper."

"In the past I've used steel wool, rust, acids such as vinegar, water, my own blood, and oak gall, an ancient painting technique from oak apples, and this time I've used just ink and the wind, " says Kruse.

"You know when we had those wind storms in January? I wanted to see the wind paint, so I poured ink on the paper and then held it to the wind to see what happened."

If this strikes you as a batty wind-up, think again, because all Kruse's ink-and-wind drawings were sold at the preview night last weekend.

"If the whole point of my work is that I don't control it, then Nathan's work is very controlled, " says Kruse. Indeed it is, being as neat and tidy as his trim beard.

"I've done a series called Horizon, where I use marks to build up the picture and the blank space on the paper is just as much a part of the drawing, " says Nathan, who makes elegant, exacting drawings with ink on paper.

"His drawings are made up of hundreds of precisely executed marks that are a breathtaking example of painstaking hours of artistic labour and a master-class in the use of negative space, " says Greg.

"I'm not patient in general, but for these works, that is the way to achieve the end result, " says Nathan. "It's like the research process for an architect, and in my case all the slight variations are fascinating, driving me through to the end product."

Kruse chips in: "Art is work at the end of the day, and there's a lot of work that goes into Nathan's art. It's the labour of art that makes it so interesting for all of us, whether it's me battling with storms or Nathan doing his marks so methodically."

Drawing Works hopes to stir up debate into the nature of drawing, and Catherine Scriven adds to that debate by using tracing paper, and in particularly architect's design paper, on account of its translucent quality.

"Catherine is an accomplished draughtswoman and she makes exquisite drawings full of movement and delicate colour that give unexpected depth and meaning to such everyday objects as a pair of shoes or an item of clothing, building each image with hundreds of subtle, coloured lines, " says Ails Denholm.

"Particularly beautiful and unusual are the delicate and ethereal drawings she makes on tracing paper with coloured pencil."

Why does she like this surface for her work? "Any problems with tracing paper are more to do with its display, but the benefit is that it's so smooth, " says Catherine.

"I'm very tactile in my work and the way my marks register depends on the texture."

The last word goes to the everfeisty Kruse: "We're driven to get strong contemporary work on show in York because there are some very fine artists in the city who do some beautiful work but it's not always challenging, and sometimes it's just fun to have something more edgy like Drawing Works."

Please Do Not Bend presents Drawing Works at The ArtSpace, Tower Street, York, until June 9.