CONTEMPORARY DRAWING — The National Collection of Contemporary Drawing

ed. Paul M O’Reilly

ISBN 978 0946641 710    144 pages (clothbound hardback)   22.5x22.5cm   73 illus

Published to coincide with the first full showing of the collection at Limerick City Gallery of Art, this book explores the art of drawing, with full-page, colour reproductions of 73 drawings by 47 artists, accompanied by a major essay, biographical notes on the artists, and an interesting and useful collection of chronologies in the appendix detailing how the collection was originated and subsequently developed.

The drawing collection is the real gem of Limerick’s gallery ... For a more comprehensive overview of drawing in the late twentieth century in Ireland, one could find no better collection. 

 — Ciarán Bennett, Irish Architect

Excellent full-colour reproductions of this remarkable collection, which is, indeed, national in scope and world-class in quality. This is a beautifully produced book. 

— Books Ireland

_____

EXTRACT

"Because drawing is so readily practised and understood as an activity – a basic human activity – it lies very close to where these urges for liberation continue to spring from. Some attempts succeed better than others. Some, like the sown seed in the parable, fail for one reason or another. Artists, no more than their audiences, are not immune to failure, to being thwarted, compromised or seduced into co-operation with the very forces they start out to free themselves from. Much of contemporary drawing shows signs of this continuing struggle.
          This National Collection of Contemporary Drawing ... shows evidence of how this struggle takes place. The idea of what constitutes a drawing is left up to the sense each artist makes of the activity. Anything an artist says is a drawing, is a drawing. So styles vary enormously; they can even contradict one another. A kind of anarchy can be said to reign. This open, tolerant attitude toward the meaning of drawing provides the best chance, perhaps, of gaining that liberation artists and audiences alike seek through works of art, the chance to make meaning, to make sense out of the world they share, even if it is only to pull or try to pull the plug.
          For all the diversity and contradiction in this struggle, there is a unifying principle: what RG Collingwood refers to as ‘the conscious expression of emotion’. He offers this as a working definition of art, of art understood as an activity. People, artists and audiences are continually engaged in this activity. In it they have the opportunity, they take the responsibility to consciously express emotion openly, candidly, honestly. In the very act of doing so, they confront themselves, they have the chance to find out who they are.
          In drawing we become the things we draw and we confront ourselves in them. In a special, intimate and vulnerable way we then face and state the truth about ourselves and take another step toward liberation. All that drawings offer us are steps in the right direction."

— from the essay by Paul O’Reilly