Da Gadderie, Shetland Museum and Arcvhives, Lerwick, Shetland, until 20 November 2011

DRAWING is, at its very heart, an exploration of the world without and within.

Through the triangular process of eye, brain and hand we create a response in two dimensions. Someone once described it as an outward looking search process and an inward looking retrieval system. It’s also at the heart of what Ron Sandford is about as a visual artist. In a new, huge show of his drawings at Da Gadderie in the Shetland Museum, we see more than a glimpse of what he has achieved in the last couple of decades.

Ron Sandford - Trout

With a background in graphic art, architecture and pure draughtsmanship he couldn’t fail to develop his analytical style, and there are plenty of examples of the various sources and disciplines which found their way into the work. Living in Hong Kong for seven years also honed a leaner, cleaner approach to drawing. This oriental influence has worked on many levels and gives his drawings both a sparseness but also myriad detail in his handling of subject matter.

Take for example Garden, Castello di Broglio, a result of travels in Europe. Here the subject is seen from a giddy viewpoint, a characteristic of his more architectural work, high up surveying a landscape which fades into the distance. Using pen, ink and pencil we sense depth and a strong 3D feeling, the tones, shadows hatched and cross-hatched suggesting bulk, form, and the sky, a collection of ruled verticals. Details of trees are there, but only abstracted into pattern and line. Further away the landscape is further reduced to jagged lines suggesting trees. It is a tour de force of mark making, and similar effects are seen throughout the show.

Colour is often subordinate, but where it forms an integral feature, such as Mid Autumn Festival, it is applied skilfully and with imagination. This piece betrays Sandford’s love of the East and the Japanese artist Hokusai. The calligraphic interplay of white over a dark blue ground tinged with grey is high–lighted with intense red for lanterns at a rocky harbour. It is such a dramatic scene and becomes more than mere illustration. Carp Lanterns is in a similar vein.

Just occasionally I sense decorative overkill where the image is actually drowned out by the linear pattern, such as in Predator, where the finely observed fish is overpowered by the flowers and patterns, or in Rice Mill, where I feel the cross-hatching has almost obscured the subject.

However, at its best Sandford’s work relays directly that analytical element present in observational drawing, or ‘eye-balling’, as David Hockney puts it. His series of works Yell Banks focus on a landscape on his island home where closely observed features such as flowers, rope, rocks, seaweed interplay with the multi-layered, almost jazzy rock formations where colour has been introduced in the manner of a mosaic. This emphasis on the decorative takes it to the borders of objective illustration. Each large drawing in the series has something different to say about the structure of the landscape.

Humour is another feature which I’ve not necessarily considered in his work before. I laughed at his Northern Xmas Lights, Cullivoe, which features a hilarious rendering of a novelty reindeer and sleigh decoration on a cold, spare landscape.

These are personal images and a testament to an almost obsessive desire to draw. Even more intimate are the figure drawings. There are collections of small sketches observed on a journey, there are beautifully delicate drawings of Sandford’s child and then there are large figures in static poses. The Cool Hat drawings present a challenge in composing the figure within the rectangle. For me the drawing that works best of all is Yellow Hat, if only for the obsessive white dots and patterns suggesting the sitter’s polka-dot dress and the patchwork of colour behind. More delicate is the beautiful portrait of Suki Chan.

With his architectural background Sandford couldn’t help but include lots of buildings in his work. These, as mentioned before, use intense detail, imaginative viewpoints and sharp sense of depth and scale. Some, like Punmun Gate, use colour to great effect while others are full of monochromatic mark-making.

Of the Shetland-based pieces, I thought that the series Shetland Gothic worked best of all. Using the interior of a building roofed with an upturned boat, and there are several examples in the Islands, the structure of the boat’s framework mirrors that of the great Gothic cathedral arches. The addition of complex drawings of agricultural objects adds to this Gothic quality a sense almost of the torture chamber.

More imaginative is Winter Whalefirth, which is turned into an illustrative narrative featuring the Northern Lights.

Throughout this show the draughtsmanship is strong, the observation keen and the details almost obsessive. Certainly it is drawing on a large scale, literally; with well over 60 pieces it’s perhaps just a few too many. In the end it’s back to the connection between eye, brain and hand. The artist drawing what is before him and rendering the 3D world on a 2D surface choosing what to put in and leave out. Much of it follows Matisse’s dictum that ‘all that is not useful in the picture is detrimental’. Highly recommended.

© Peter Davis, 2011

Links

• Ron Sandford
• Shetland Museum