Preview: Drawing season, RWA

“Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see,” observed the great Impressionist artist Edgar Degas.

This spring, the Royal West of England Academy presents a season of drawing with three new exhibitions: Drawn, Lines in a Landscape: Drawings from the Royal Collection and Beyond the Sketchbook: Drawings from the RWA Collection. Showing work by internationally-renowned contemporary artists alongside masters of Western European art from a world-class collection, the RWA’s Spring programme also reveals some hidden-gems from the Academy’s own collection.

The welcome return of Drawn, its biennial open-submissions exhibition, features printmaker and Royal Academician Norman Ackroyd as Invited Artist; the exhibition’s selection panel includes Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection; Johanna Baring, Director and Curator of The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art; and Academicians Peter Randall-Page RA RWA, Sarah Gillespie RWA and Lawrence Nash RWA.

The exhibition will also see the return of the popular Drawing Lab, an artist-led space which will evolve throughout the exhibition as artists and the public investigate the practice of drawing adding their own drawings and experiments to the walls.

“Drawn celebrates drawing as a means of communication and navigation, fundamental in making, doing, testing, designing, thinking, playing and living,” explains RWA Head of Programmes Gemma Brace. “Diversity is at its heart, encouraging artists from a range of disciplines including illustrators, videographers, sculptors, printers, embroiderers, typographers, animators and architects.”

Next up, Lines in a Landscape: Drawings from the Royal Collection is a new exhibition of landscape drawings selected from the drawings and watercolours in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle and featuring works by Canaletto, Gainsborough and Claude Lorrain – considered by many to be the 17th century’s greatest landscape artist.

Finally, Beyond the Sketchbook: Drawings from the RWA Collection presents an opportunity to view rarely seen works, exploring the intimacy of drawing as both an act an expression of an artist’s identity including works by Lord Methuen PPRWA, Ann Christopher RA and Paul Thomas (co-founder of the Jerwood Drawing Prize).

The trio of shows has something for everyone, Gemma suggests. “Our spring programme celebrates the universality of drawing, looking at the art form’s past and present and encouraging visitors to see how fundamental drawing is to all our lives. There is something ‘incomplete’ about the very nature of drawing which creates the perfect place for conversation – and, through our very own ‘lab’, audiences can explore this for themselves and make their own mark on the show.”

Drawn, Lines in a landscape: Drawings from The Royal Collection and Beyond the Sketchbook: Drawings from the RWA Collection all open on Saturday, April 1. For more information visit www.rwa.org.uk