I Sing the Body Electric: Drawing and Painting Active Bodies in an Active Workplace

Abstract

This project explores how drawing and painting based on extended observation can render vitality. Having embedded myself in my local automotive repair workshop, I made a large number of experimental paintings and drawings. I tested how forms of figuration and abstraction varied in their ability to convey the vitality of the scene and the painter’s presence. The investigation led to a final body of paintings in which areas of figuration broke down, allowing other elements such as gesture and colour to be freed from form, and to convey energy, rhythm, noise and rotation. This particular capacity of drawing and painting means that those practices still have a place to play in the depiction of everyday workplaces—currently, largely, the province of photography and documentary filmmaking.