My metalpoint drawing, ‘Photobooth Portrait (…love Mum)’, has been selected to be part of the 2023 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. The work is one of an ongoing series of drawings based on photobooth images of my mum, taken at various times, and which I’ve found about the house at various moments. This piece is drawn mostly with silver and gold, but with some blue biro lines as well.
This series of drawings is a gradually ongoing series of works which I return to from time to time. The drawings are partly a kind of meditation on the surviving physical traces of moments of a life. In common with many of my drawings, this piece has been almost endlessly re-worked within a process of repeated scratching-away and redrawing. I use metalpoint tools as well as various needles, scalpel blades and sandpaper. As I work on these, I am constantly trying to catch a glimpse of something which I could not have foreseen, but which feels true (I can’t explain it). Drawing is a way of thinking, for me.
This drawing also includes lines of hand-written text. In the centre, below the image of the face, is a date, Tuesday 22 Nov 1983, written in blue biro. This is my copy of my mum’s handwriting on the back of the original strip of photographs, and including her handwriting in the drawing is another way of bringing her presence into the drawing. The other lines of handwriting are my transcriptions from letters she sent to me at various times in the past.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize exhibition will open in September at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London and then tours to other venues around the UK. This year’s selectors are the Artist Barbara Walker MBE RA, the Executive Director of The Drawing Center New York Laura Hoptman, and the Collector & Arts Patron Dennis Scholl AM.
Roy Eastland: Drawing 