Siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself. – Samuel Beckett
In my introductory post I mention my debt to the painter Tatiana Litvinov, who didn’t waste time. As I primed six-foot canvases and hauled them around the Sussex Downs in search of some arresting natural feature, wearing myself out before I had even set up my materials, she simply worked, day to day, with whatever was to hand, from motifs found in urban settings that I would have overlooked. Professor John Milner, curator of one of her last exhibitions, describes this ‘analytical process of observation leading to dynamic constructions in drawings and paintings’ and Tatiana’s ‘agility and inventiveness’ that enabled her to see and realize the dramatic potential in her subjects. As far as I know she never returned from a train journey without a clutch of drawings made of other passengers, as they slept or gazed out at the landscape. Of course the ‘analysis,’ getting to the heart of the matter, comes with experience. I am nearing the age Tatiana had reached when I first knew her. Nothing I’ve done stands comparison with the singularity and vigour of her work. But among the artists I’ve known she remains my most important teacher, not less for my becoming an émigré in east Asia. She often spoke of her ‘rootlessness,’ which would accord with what Milner calls ‘her appetite for independent discovery’ and although, as he adds, her work was fed by memory as much as direct observation, her investigations did not allow too much time for introspection.
I was both an early beginner and a late developer. I’ve been drawing since I was a small child, but never again as freely as then. Later I was increasingly given to making notes, which tended to be written rather than drawn (the People’s Janitor dwells on this elsewhere). The writing was driven by an endless whirl of ideas that produced nothing of exchange value and generally were not worth the recording and examining. Occasionally having the sense to stop writing in mid-sentence and use the pen to start drawing instead was an instant relief, a revelation. Drawing, unlike writing, was a welcome interaction with externality, like picking up an axe or a spade. But setting out to make a drawing, like serious writing, takes gumption. The kind that brings relief, the only kind I wish to do, entails the discipline of looking. If it were easy there would be no benefit.
As an undergraduate, years before meeting Tatiana, I favoured long poses in the life-room, but for the wrong reasons. I have mentioned this in the post hard lines; I hope the repetition is bearable. I relished the opportunity to make an impressive, bold likeness (as I thought) on a large surface and believed that the more time I had to work on a single drawing from a single pose, the better the result would be. But the boldness the drawing really required was the willingness to abandon the dumbly muscular lines, declare nothing, accept risk and above all keep my eyes open. I was eventually forced to do this by the disapprobation of tutors and fellow students. I learned slowly, but began to interrogate my work more severely.
Drawing in sketchbooks didn’t become a habit, unfortunately, for many years after I left art school. When I insisted that my own students make full use of sketchbooks in developing their ideas, this understanding came more naturally to them than it had to me, which was all to the good. It was my job to encourage them to explore every possibility and any medium. But my ideas are worked through on the canvas; none of them survive the process, nor should they. In my case it’s not a journey that might end with a video, an installation or a performance piece. It’s just going to be a long tussle with the same mud on bits of cloth. If I had ever come near to mastering painting, perhaps I might have tried something else, but there it is. At any rate, everything starts with a drawing.
In the 1990s I returned to London for a time and explored some unfamiliar districts, particularly Haringey. I drew in the streets, with a stick of graphite on scraps of paper a few inches square: roads, houses, trees. I still tended to apply unnecessary force, but these drawings were the best I had made at that point and suggested something of a breakthrough. They had become more interesting as things in themselves, but it was only as their efficiency developed further, as they took in more information about form, space and light, that it was possible to use such a drawing as a basis for painting. By then I had exchanged London for Seoul, where I went on drawing in the street, particularly in the early years, and in the markets around Dongdaemun and Euljiro. Eventually a new post at a distant university reduced the opportunity. But those places did not change much until after the covid pandemic, when an immense and unprecedented influx of foreign visitors prompted them to shed their idiosyncracies and become synthetic, ersatz and monocultural, in the way of rapacious makeovers of charming places everywhere. One Korean friend was driven out of the district he had long lived in (see Addenda). Regretfully, the drawings I made before the charm was extirpated still lacked the efficiency I speak of, but it may be possible to reconstitute something from the traces in them, like seedlings, of my firmest impressions.
At the Park Su Geun museum in Yanggu, built to commemorate that artist shortly before I arrived in Korea, his small sketches of people out and about also made a strong impression. But I persisted in expending time and energy on unnecessarily large works, with what now seems perverse obstinacy (and despite – like Park, in fact – having no studio space). It would be difficult to explain why. Eventually I began instead to do everything on a smaller scale, realizing that the power and scope of a drawing has nothing to do with its size, and to close in with my sketchbook on the single figure, seen in passing. More locations and situations offered possibilities for drawing people. Displayed on this page are some of the small drawings I’ve made in them, over a dozen years. It is essential for me to continue this activity. The title is taken from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (p.211): the author observes that the idealism of Dorothea Brooke, in her devotion to Edward Casaubon, makes it difficult ‘…to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects – that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the light and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.’
The new place of employment, at Incheon, was two hours from my home in North Seoul. I made the journey three or four days a week, thirty-two weeks of the year, for twelve years. Neither the route nor its destination offers much to interest the landscape painter. Instead, after Tatiana’s example, I would draw other passengers on the train, during the forty-minute run between Yongsan and Juan. There was no need to make a show of this. It isn’t portraiture and doesn’t, in my view, constitute a violation. It has nothing to do with the person and takes nothing from them. To burden them with the consciousness of being drawn would be absurd, and nothing would result. I worked on scraps of drawing paper carried among the foolscap on which, when there was no one to draw, I drafted letters or planned lessons.
The example at the head of this page (Old man eating sweets) is a reworking in oil of a sketch first done with a ballpoint pen. Obligingly my subjects tended to sleep, unless they were absorbed in their phones, which was not entirely helpful in that its fixation on these little boxes makes the human figure less interesting than it has been since it began walking on two legs. The singer Lisa O’Neill recently remarked that, when out and about, it is only old people that she sees ‘looking up.’ Yet the drawing is still a vital exercise. Sometimes I myself was too fatigued, or dithered until the figure I was thinking of drawing stirred, rose and disembarked. On several occasions, waking from a doze, I would find before me an irresistible subject who remained there only a few more seconds. But every opportunity, however fleeting, should be seized.
Another foreigner who used the service regularly – in those days we were few – was a man of about my own age whom I made repeated attempts to draw with a biro pen; a book-reader with a professorial air but easily distracted. Whenever he glanced up I switched my attention back to the letter I was drafting (I always had a half-written letter before me) and beneath which I stealthily slid the drawing one day as he put his book aside, approached me and said: ‘I’ve seen you on this train many times, and very time I see you, you’re writing. And by hand! You’re a novelist, am I right?’ For he himself was a frustrated writer and, like me, an English teacher, on his way to work at a school at Bucheon. Furthermore, as it turned out, he was from Morocco and, once on his feet, conspicuously drunk – drawing sharp looks – though it wasn’t yet eleven in the morning. I confessed that I wrote only letters, which was true. But he wasn’t inquisitive so much as desirous of talk. His stepping out of the drawing, and the unknown, would have made it impossible for me to draw him again. But it was our last meeting; I imagine that he lost his job that day.
A tendency towards disjunctive relations with the world will be underscored rather than modified by going off to live in a strange country, even if those relations in some way occasion the choice. The seclusion of childhood is strongly recalled by certain things: in my case, trains especially. By the age of nine or ten I routinely made suburban train journeys alone, as did other children, in an age that appears ridiculously more remote than it is. It was some sixty years ago. Being an outsider in my present surroundings, and a train passenger, evokes it completely. Gazing out of the window I still imagine, like Wolf Solent on his train journey to Dorset, forty more years back – haunted by the face on the Waterloo steps! – a figure sprinting alongside the carriage, keeping pace with it and deftly leaping over every obstacle. Another sixty years beyond Powys’s novel we find Rosa, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, whose ‘train came into London over the housetops’; that is, on the viaducts it crossed at the end of a trip from the south-east coast, an experience which once seemed as marvellous to me as it had to Dickens. If I had been a few years older I’d have ridden everywhere from Perranporth to Skerrow Halt, before the Beeching cuts.
I have been familiar with the large Samsung medical centre at Irwon, south of the Han, more or less since my arrival in Korea. A new cancer wing opened at about the time I began the journeys to Incheon. This section includes a mezzanine overlooking a large waiting area below, illuminated by huge windows beyond which – best of all – is a green space covered with tall trees. The older Yonsei University hospital at Sinchon is as sprawling and contains a greater number of interesting spaces, but I haven’t found another location in Seoul that affords such favourable conditions for drawing people with so little likelihood of being observed or interrupted. The first time I went there for this purpose I made a few indifferent sketches of groups of hospital patients and their visitors on the long row of seats before the window, talking, eating, sleeping, ruminating, before I noticed a woman of about seventy, sitting alone and still, whom I drew quickly (Hospital figure 1), having ‘warmed up’ a bit with my previous attempts. This time, the drawing seemed to work better; pausing and wondering how or whether to take it further, I put on my long-distance glasses, which brought the subject into sharper focus. I was using these progressively less, as my long sight improved with age, and clarity of detail tended to divert me from the unity of space and form that was my chief interest. But the glasses also revealed that the woman was weeping, and at this I gave up the drawing and did not look at her again. Nor did I see the drawing for several years. I placed it between the leaves of a rarely-consulted book, and forgot what I had done with it.
Humans, caught / On ground curiously neutral, homes and names / Suddenly in abeyance… (Philip Larkin, ‘The Building’).
Not long ago you would search in vain throughout Seoul for real coffee, but now coffee shops, like bakeries, are found every few yards. A boom has been presided over by the zoomers, moving into areas where their parents and grandparents formerly ran workshops, warehouses or, in the district of Chungmuro, printing presses and photographic laboratories. Costs are rising and the boom may soon end. But over the past three years, from time to time, I’ve returned to a particular cafe on a street corner between Chungmuro and Myeongdong; a single, broad, dusky-walled space filled with tables and bentwood chairs (which I like for their more human shapes), where the coffee is bitter, strong and still affordable, customers tend to be middle-aged or above and interior lighting does not obliterate what sunlight enters the windows, this being quite adequate for working. The general effect recalls, for me, something of the coffee houses in the London suburbs of the sixties and seventies, but in a way that probably could not happen unless by accident.
I’ve made some drawings in concert halls and hope to make many more, but conditions are not always suitable; for example, over-lighting frequently flattens the space occupied by the rostrum and the figures on it. But if I can find a good position to work, without distracting either players or audience, and the lighting is not too strong, there’s nothing to beat drawing musicians. Racing to get a drawing resolved before the end of each movement is deeply thrilling, almost as if I were playing up there with them, because I’ve got to get it right and there’ll be no second chance. I should have done much more of this, much earlier in life. I say that nothing could be better than drawing musicians, but as I’m reminded by Degas – his extraordinary Dancers in the Green Room is presently on display in Seoul – it would be wonderful to draw professional dancers. I’ll see what might be done about that.
For a drawing to work, it has to have movement. Images in comic-books, for example, tend to lack this; motion may be laboriously signified but it isn’t inherent in the figures, however grandiose. The Manga material that is now everywhere is a good example; to me all its forms and depictions, endlessly replicated, seem perfectly static. I can’t say the same of graphic artists I recall from an earlier age, such as Robert Crumb or Leo Baxendale. Whether the drawing is made by a painter or a cartoonist (assuming a human hand), only training in drawing directly from life will induce the understanding that everything seen is filled with movement; that any object resting in space is a mass of changing depths, planes and directions; that as we look at it we move around it, as it moves around us. The object and I are present in one space; this shared presence creates tension, sensed in the drawing, and nothing in this relationship is ever really still.
When I draw something I am drawing the bodily sense of this presence, tension and motion, because I feel it viscerally. An inert drawing would mean that I haven’t been looking. The marks are constantly revised; nothing is made final. In this way the drawing approaches the likeness of the thing, or the likeness of the encounter. I’m not interested in making a representation that’s merely symbolic: an icon, an illustration or a caricature.
Tatiana and I belonged to a ‘big gang of painters’- so called by Julian Bell, kindly reviewing our group exhibition in Modern Painters – all of whom shared a reverence for certain artists of the past. But Alberto Giacometti, whose drawings I first saw in Norwich in 1981, was important to the two of us in particular. In a 1964 interview with David Sylvester, Giacometti compared painting with sculpture:
‘(In) painting you create a total illusion of the reality… when you’re looking at someone full face, for example, you’re not thinking about what’s behind his face; you’re not thinking conceptually, you’re thinking visually. There’s more illusion involved than when you’re working with real volume. With sculpture… Even Rodin still took measurements when he was making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make… the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual… I think we have for so long automatically accepted the received idea of what a head should look like that we have made ourselves completely incapable of seeing a head as we really see it.
‘I can’t even understand how anyone can do a head life size – either in painting or in sculpture. When I see a life-size head in a picture by Cezanne, or a head by Rodin or Courbet or Titian… I can’t even conceive how they could have done it… (And) if it (the head) is larger than life size, it’s outside our domain… in the course of history, perception has been mentally transposed into concept… I don’t see directly any more, I see you through my knowledge.’*
I stopped watching television forty years ago, twenty years after Giacometti’s death. I couldn’t bear it somehow. Perhaps I have a problem with screens; I also loathe mobile phones. But in those days the size of a TV screen had grown to about twenty-one inches. The illusion of form and space was yet not so uncomfortably far from a natural scale, but now, in super-sized monitors, is amplified many times beyond it. They tend to induce nausea whenever I can’t avoid looking at them. Whether in someone’s home or installed on the side of a building, they’re a Brobdingnagian horror. Their existence, among other things, suggests that the transposition of perception into concept has greatly advanced. If watching TV were compulsory, even for only five minutes a day, I would hope to God that somehow I might be allowed to have back my old black-and-white 625-line, or a Sony Trinitron or something; anything but that luridly digitalized, unsparing, bloated unrealness. But what it comes to is that an artist like Giacometti almost certainly would not have existed in the twenty-first century. That would be a loss for which I see no compensation.
The Romanian-born artist Avigdor Arikha, friend of Giacometti and Samuel Beckett, experienced what he described as ‘a violent hunger in the eyes’ on encountering, in the Louvre, Caravaggio’s The Raising of Lazarus. The author and critic Gaby Wood explains that from this time – the mid-1960s – Arikha ‘renounced (his word) abstraction’ for fear of becoming ‘mannered and false,’ and ‘set himself new rules of engagement. He decided that the only unlimited wellspring was the observable world around us. “You were right,” he told Giacometti, who had encouraged him to work from life.’**
Back in the life-drawing room I had realised that a drawing that had got absolutely nowhere with two minutes remaining of the allowed time might yet make great advances. In fact the most successful were always among those that were erased and desperately worked over at this stage. So the availability of long poses now afforded much greater scope. I began to understand how to learn from a drawing; when to leave it and begin another; that to destroy and rework, at any time, a drawing that lacked cohesion and unity, or about which I felt any doubt, or that I found myself striving to ‘complete,’ was rarely to my disadvantage.
A drawing made in a moment, scratched down in half a dozen lines – especially under pressure of time – can intuitively take in what is essential and vital to the original vision. But, absent this pressure, the next round of marks can obscure it again and the drawing lose its transforming power, as though Hermione had turned back into stone. But the vitality is recovered with persistence. I try harder to see again the coherence that was plain at first sight, before it began to dissipate under scrutiny. Pencil held ready, I devote my gaze wholly to the subject, passively, without analysis, for a long time, so that it can embrace me afresh. Then I quickly turn my eyes back, and the shortcomings in the drawing are obvious: lines too heavy, too light; in the wrong position, the wrong direction.
But I don’t take my eyes off the subject for more than a second. I work over the old lines with new lines, moving across the whole drawing, never dwelling on one area. What is transmitted by the subject enters my eyes but is sensed in my whole body, and I respond viscerally, from where the connection with the subject is sensed. In fact, more than a transmission or a connection, it is like a collision of forces. Out in the landscape, this is sometimes so intense as to feel like vertigo. Here, not so much, but the work proceeds in the same way. Nothing is calculated.
When something interesting results in those first few seconds, but this turns out to be all the time I’m allowed, I preserve what there is of the drawing, like any other, to absorb the lesson in it. If I don’t immediately perceive what it is, eventually it becomes apparent, usually when I haven’t looked at the thing for months or years and unexpectedly come upon it again. At these moments the drawing, or painting as it may be, suddenly ‘looks at me’ and declares its successes or defects. But the latter, inevitably, sooner or later plainly reveal themselves in every one of those drawings that once satisfied me so much.
In Rembrandt’s ink drawings, from the early modern age, we see ourselves completely, summarized in a few lines. But they were made before the rise of consumer society prompted the ‘intellectual and emotional response’ that was the Romantic movement, the root of twentieth-century conceptualism and ‘those attitudes and practices called postmodern,’ † all of which has been an interminable search for something else to say. By the end of that century art had been reduced to a ‘punchline’ (the word is Damien Hirst’s).‡
A single Rembrandt self-portrait, on the other hand, with its grandeur, density and reach, goes on speaking to us after four centuries. I studied the extraordinary Kenwood House painting, made late in his life, perhaps three times when I lived in England. I have not seen it again, but my memory of it seems to sharpen with the passage of time, to broaden and deepen, as if the knowledge held in the painting, perceived in the unconscious as I stood there, has taken half a lifetime to be relayed to consciousness. It is as if I had been squinting at the portrait from the far end of the corridor and have since stepped slowly closer. From day to day, out on my rounds somewhere in Seoul, the sight of a group of people, or a single figure, likewise can seem to open up all the world and human history. The impression is of breaking into an endlessly extending field of positive energy. For much of my life I only suspected how important these vibrations are. The drawing catches at that momentary current of energy, as if trying to tame some great creature that hovers just out of reach. Like Giacometti, I know that it’s impossible to make a likeness of something as I really see it. But it is possible to approach that likeness ever nearer, even so. The surface of the paper needs some texture, to grip the pencil. Getting a line right, when it happens, feels like fitting the wheels of an engine to the tracks. But nothing is ever made final. And if the connection fails – its absence always jars – then there is nothing for it but to erase those lines and begin again, whatever pains are necessary, however little time is left, or nothing will come of the attempt.
* David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1994); translations by Pamela Sylvester and Barbara Wright.
**Gaby Wood, ‘Avigdor Arikha’s Prints’ London Review of Books, Vol 47 No 19, 23 October 2025
† Here I have borrowed from Professor Susan M. Pearce, who in her book Collecting in Contemporary Practice (London, SAGE Publications, 1998), p.179, argues that ‘the break between modern and postmodern is less extreme than supposed, and this becomes clear when the analysis of contemporary society is put within an historical context.’
‡ From an interview with Gordon Burn from April 2000, in Burn’s book On The Way to Work (New York: Universe, 2002)