Drawing has long been the lynchpin of artistic endeavour. One of the first art schools to open in Europe was the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno or Academy of the Arts of Drawing in Florence. It was founded in 1563 by Cosimo I de’ Medici at the behest of the painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari. The nominal head of the institution was Cosimo himself and it was inspired by none other than Michelangelo. The three disciplines of the academy – painting, architecture and sculpture – are represented in its emblem of three interlocking laurel wreaths, reflecting the belief at the time that these art forms stemmed from the same root, drawing. It has long been understood that drawing is a way to visualise the invisible and that it is an undisputed tool in an artist’s repository, regardless of the discipline being pursued.

The exhibition Imaginary Lines explores art patron Bianca Roden’s collection of Old Master drawings in dialogue with artists who have participated in Xenia, the artist residency established by Roden in Hampshire. By pairing contemporary practitioners with works by the Old Masters, audiences can trace the development of drawing across time; how perceptions and the applications of drawing have evolved; the use of abstraction or texture in the medium; and the impact of technology. The exhibition includes works from as early as the fourteenth century, at which time attitudes towards drawing shifted from viewing it as a tool towards recognising it as a work of art in its own right. The show focuses on the nature of mark-making in the creative process, examining what artists working today have inherited, consciously or unconsciously, from the great masters of the past, challenging the iconography and symbols of the Western canon and using or subverting them for contemporary audiences.

Drawing is how artists experiment. Through drawing, an artist can explore how light bounces off a surface or the mass of a given object without having to commit to a painting or sculpture. It is the means of arriving at artistic decisions and a way of finding solutions to artistic problems. The tone of an artwork can shift with the angle of the head or tilt of the face. For example, in François Boucher’s Study of a man standing, an actor in Les Fâcheux by Molière (c.1730s), the artist explores how best to draw the back leg of the actor in order to suggest the illusion of movement and tension in his limbs. The Italian word for drawing is desegno, which incorporates two meanings: firstly, the physical act of mark-making and, secondly, the design or arrangement of a composition.

There is an immediacy to drawing. It can be quick and playful, and capable of capturing a fleeting moment. Artists have also used drawing to experiment with new materials and technologies. Drawing is traditionally associated with a pen or pencil applied to paper, but artists have drawn on various surfaces such as marble, stone and board, and used different mediums and colours to produce their desired texture.

This experimentation is still seen today, with artists stretching the boundaries of what might be considered drawing, as in the work of Nao Matsunaga. He is fascinated by our tendency to anthropomorphise objects. Even in the most abstract of images, he will try to find a human face and assign to it an emotion based on the apparent found and accidental expressiveness. Matsunaga’s drawing uses the unconventional material of clay as a medium. He creates surfaces on which to draw using flattened clay into which he embosses various textures, and then adds watered-down clay (or slip) and glaze to draw on the prepared surface. His hand is guided to draw abstractly, dripping and pulling the clay and allowing his emotions to lead the design like a dance. The drama and anxiety Matsunaga exposes in his work echoes the work of Mannerist Il Parmigianino, whose work is readily identifiable by his use of elongated forms, creating graceful figures and a sensual drama in his paintings. Both artists are exploring the possibilities of depicting expression in the human face as a means of conveying emotion. They are separated by almost 500 years of artistic endeavour, yet the essence of the investigation has remained unchanged, although the artwork could not look more different in style. 

Drawing and experimentation can also express an intimate connection between subject and material. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, used linen for his ground when drawing studies of drapery, and Michelangelo favoured vellum, made of animal skin, when drawing the body. When addressing her choice of materials in connection with the subject matter, Abbie Griffiths expresses a deep affinity with the materials she uses for her sculptures, and borrows the framework from traditional sculptures and statues in art history such as the formal bust or the carved marble sculptures of the Renaissance. She chooses non-traditional materials including used fabrics such as bedsheets and curtains, often found in charity shops dirtied and stained, and industrial expanding foam. The fabrics are dipped in plaster or clay, draped over a base structure and sculpted and adjusted until she has achieved the desired form, and then allowed to set. She injects the sculpture with industrial foam, introducing an element of chance as it expands, filling the gaps with what she calls an unsightly but much-loved substance. Griffiths admires the foam for its resemblance to flesh, the dimples looking like aged and cracked skin riddled with cellulite and imperfections. She comments that if left in direct sunlight, the foam reacts to the exposure and changes colour like burnt skin. The body is a reminder of mortality, while the stained fabrics hold memories, be they of the home or childhood.

Although her final work is sculptural, Griffiths relies on drawing to direct her artistic energies on a daily basis, especially if she is unable to attend the studio. It is her way of capturing her thoughts and the sights she encounters, the energies of which she will transfer into her sculpture. For the exhibition, Griffiths has been paired with Jean-Antoine Watteau’s An elegant young woman and a dog; a drapery study for their shared practice of dipping fabric into plaster and allowing it to set. Artists in the past, such as da Vinci, have practised this technique as a way of ensuring the fabrics do not fall out of shape before a painting has been finished.

With a skilled hand, drawing can be executed efficiently and effectively in just a few strokes. The curve of a line or the weight of the pencil can make the difference between a determined posture or a disheartened one, an irritated or pleased expression. When preparing for a painting, Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny often drew and sketched scenes en plein air to capture the arc of a branch or a shadow cast across a pond, which he would use later in his studio when preparing the final painting. A limited number of lines are used to depict Claude Corot, his good friend and mentor, in his drawing of around 1826 from the Roden Collection. Although more time and attention has been spent on the cross-hatching of the face, the effect achieved in just a few strokes of the pen is that of a windswept man whose hair has been ruffled by the elements. The paper held by Corot, rendered by d’Aligny in six simple strokes, creates an effect of three-dimensionality.

Oren Pinhassi also uses lines to create three-dimensional form, not on paper as with d’Aligny, but in sculpture. His works investigate queer space using the language of architecture and everyday objects on a monumental scale, and are awkward figures composed of slender lines drawn in space three-dimensionally. The use of drawing is specifically discernible in his sand works – as in the one included in the exhibition – which lack the polished finish of the bronze pieces and betray the presence of the artist’s hand. The quivering lines of the sculpture lack perfection and afford his figures a human softness. Pinhassi has developed a unique visual language, borrowing from the tradition of the ready-made incorporating familiar forms such as shower rails or palm trees which infuse his work with humour.

An artist’s work is inevitably in conversation with the art of the past, whether in terms of subject matter or in formal structure and technique, as evident in the work of Graham Little and Sarah Knowland. In Untitled (Garden) of 1972, Little has constructed an ambiguous narrative surrounding a lone figure, framed by nature within the frame of the canvas. Similarly, the eighteenth-century French painter Hubert Robert, in View of a Garden with Statuary, uses the technique of framing his garden with foliage within the frame of the picture. Little uses fashion magazine images from the 1980s, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and, most frequently, the German style magazine Burda Moden, to hint at a time and place, while Robert placed objects in his garden to signal his narrative, which is a scene of a Roman garden as part of his grand tour. Knowland, who uses images from popular culture to inform her paintings, adopts a chiaroscuro technique in Policed Sows II (2023) similar to that used by Il Guercino in Head and shoulders of a youth wearing a fur-trimmed hat. The depiction of flesh was perfected by the Old Masters and is here subverted by Knowland, who paint pigs whose flesh has a sinister resemblance to human skin. She has created an unsettling version of the pastoral, another point of comparison with the work of Il Guercino, who was the first to include on a painting an inscription of the Latin proverb ‘et in arcadia ego’, with the implication that death lurks in even the most idyllic of settings.

The depiction of the human figure has been an artistic preoccupation as much as that of the face. Indeed, it the reclining figure has been one of the most popular poses in art history, firmly embedded in both Eastern and Western artistic traditions, from the Buddha to nudes and figures of authority. The recumbent posture immediately conjures up a wealth of connotations, from feasting Romans to the sexualised submission of the reclining odalisques.

Walter Richard Sickert’s Reclining Nude, Fitzroy Street (1906) is one such example. His reclining nude, though erotic in nature, has strong undertones of a gritty urban life. Although it was created the year before the notorious Camden Town murders, which Sickert was fascinated by and depicted in a series of works, there is a certain sense of the macabre in this drawing. Continuing the theme of the reclining nude, Daisy May Collingridge, who was inspired by the 2002 Body Worlds exhibition by Gunther von Hagens that featured real dissected human and animal bodies, produces her own, stylised version of the nude. She creates a tension between uncomfortable subject matter and its surroundings, using hand-dyed fabrics to allude to flesh. The result is both disturbing and humorous, alerting the viewer to our absurd fascination with the exposed body.

Collingridge includes another form of drawing in her practice, one that is produced using a sewing machine. She pulls her fabrics across a padded surface and then uses stitches to draw lines, creating a sense of volume and texture in her work. The use of machines and technology in drawing has a long history. The camera obscura was a mechanical instrument comprising a darkened room or box with a convex lens or a pinhole in one side, used for projecting an image of an object on to a surface inside the instrument so that it can be viewed, drawn, or (in later use) reproduced on a light-sensitive surface. It was used by artists such as Da Vinci and Titian to assist in creating compositions. The invention of the hand-held camera in the twentieth century proved an alternative to drawing as a way of gathering information by an artist for a final painting. The most pressing challenge to drawing in the twenty-first century, however, is in the form of computers and Photoshop.

Hugo Wilson relies on Photoshop when preparing for a painting, using found images to create a composite that best illustrates what he has imagined in his mind’s eye. He sees the technology as a swift form of preparatory work, preferring to expend his efforts and exercise his skill in the act of painting. Wilson’s masterly execution reflects his classical training and engagement with the Old Masters. His paintings not only reference the Old Masters in terms of technique used, but also in their subject matter and motifs, such as his hunting scenes and still-lifes, in which he challenges traditional visual formulas of dignity, as seen in his use of animals such as the horse, conventionally used to symbolise courage or freedom. His work relies on a vocabulary created by the Old Masters, against which he might set his own critique. He is often fascinated by depictions of animals as symbols and the meanings they represent, as in the camel in Chassis II (2024).  

The camel’s symbolic evolution has been transformative. Early representations in twelfth-century Europe tended to symbolise humility and submission. The animal has long been seen as a symbol of honour and pride, patience and endurance in Arab traditions. In the West, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, camels were a favoured subject of heroic war scenes and came to represent notions of exoticism or surrealist thought. While the camel today is perhaps more marginalised in its depiction in Western art, it is considered awkward by design. Wilson has created his camel painting from various found images of camels, reinforcing the camel’s fall from grace. No longer heroic, the camel is suspended on a monochromatic ground, its image as tattered as its reputation. The monumental scale of the beast, which has an indisputable impact, is its saving grace. The exquisite hare by Jean-Baptiste Oudry is placed alongside Wilson’s dominant camel, and further underlines Wilson’s critique of our unrelenting abuse of the natural world.

Wilson is as proficient with abstraction as he is with realism. He moves adeptly between the two realms, choosing what best suits his artistic intentions at the time. There is a trace of abstraction, or at least impressionism, in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Melissa Restores Astolfo to His Natural Form. It is a scene from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso, a romantic poem of heroism with a vast cast of characters and acts of chivalry and magic, which includes a trip to the moon. Fragonard’s rendering of the scene is entirely loose, employing only a few lines to depict his protagonists and creatures against an inky abstract sky. The sense of hazy translucence of the work is emphasised by this technique, which adds to the magical atmosphere of the story.

Although evident in this particular image, such an impressionistic technique is not one generally associated with Fragonard. His work was intent on depicting the frivolity and hedonism of his times with heightened accuracy. Peach and powdery pink tones tend to dominate his palette, and his canvases feature a cast of characters that are clearly delineated. He titillated eighteenth-century French audiences with his pastoral scenes of leisure laced with erotic undertones. In 1767 he captured the mood of the Rococo period in his famous  painting The Swing, currently on display at the Wallace Collection in London. This work was painted twenty-two years before the French Revolution in 1789, at which point the public mood for Fragonard’s work soured. Many of his wealthy patrons were either exiled or guillotined.  

Fragonard often sets theatrical musical scenes within bucolic landscapes. He alludes to music with the presence of lutes, flutes, harpsicords and musettes (from the bagpipe family) in gardens flush with greenery and featuring elegantly dressed ladies captured mid-dance. Haroun Hayward (b. 1983) spent his formative years in North London in the 1990s, engaging in the tail end of the rave scene. He cites four main influences on his art: rave culture, abstraction, post-war British landscape painting and his mother’s textile collection. He combines these influences to create an autobiographical tapestry. His work shares with the example by Fragonard a transcendental quality, in Hayward’s case when he links current musical trends to landscape, reminiscent of his days of dancing in the British countryside. In his watercolours, he combines a feeling of ecstasy with the repetitive rhythmic sounds of rave music, and a sense of a hedonistic culture permeates such work, as it does that of Fragonard. The two works might differ in style, but the spirit of music, dance and transcendence is ever-present, each true to its own century.

Hayward created his watercolour for the exhibition as a direct response to the Fragonard drawing in the Roden Collection. Of the ten exhibiting young artists, four were asked to respond to an Old Master from the collection, Sophie Ruigrok, Iain Andrews, Wilson and Hayward. Allowing the artists to respond to a particular work transforms an exhibition from an entirely curatorial project to one that actively involves the artist. Ruigrok’s choice of Bernardo Strozzi stemmed from her use of accepted existing visual devotional language created by the Old Masters in her work. She uses images such as hand gestures, tears, water, teeth, feet and cloth to create emotionally intense scenes that suggest a religious fervour. Using a tight frame that omits the context of the scene, Ruigrok’s chosen subjects refer to her childhood experience of growing up in an intensely religious family. Strozzi’s Study of a hand holding a cup is a sketch for the painting Giving Drink to the Thirsty (c.1618–20) from his series Seven Acts of Mercy. The subject is thought to be Elijah, who is housed and fed by the Widow of Zarephath. When her son suddenly dies, Elijah prays to God to have him resurrected. The urgency of Elijah’s thirst is demonstrated by the way his hand grips the bowl. Ruigrok has said of the Strozzi drawing: ‘I like the contrast of the tender caress of the bowl and the tug on the ear – an act that can be interpreted as both intimate/sexual or violent. I think both images share something in the implications of a much wider story beyond the edge of the picture frame.’

The representation of the human hand predates Western art history. One of the oldest examples of painted hands can be found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, with hand markings on a cave dating back over 40,000 years. The image of the hand gesture – be it the blessing of hands in religious icons from the medieval period, the iconic hand of God awakening Adam on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican, hands clasped in prayer or the enigmatic hand gesture found in several of Egon Schiele’s works – has been employed by artists in many ways over the centuries. Ruigrok is inspired by Strozzi to adopt his vocabulary to convey her own intense experiences and thoughts.

Iain Andrews similarly borrows from the pre-existing language set down by the Baroque and Rococo periods in his own work, as in the example he has created in response to the Boucher drawings in the Roden Collection. Though primarily a painter, Andrews is also an art psychotherapist working with teenagers and children to help them through their experiences of neglect and trauma. He will often use faery (folk) tales as source material for his paintings, the subjects of which perfectly fit his work with abuse. Themes such as abandonment, cruelty, transformation, renewal and greed are also often found in faery tales. It is thought that the original tales expressed maternal anxiety and a manifestation of postnatal depression, such as stories of a mother being replaced by a faery, a creature that looks just like her but is in fact sullen and detached. 

Andrews’ Boucherula Rotundifolia (2024) is a play on Boucher’s name and the Latin name for the harebell, Campanula rotundifolia, a flower associated with everlasting love, fairy lore and witchcraft. Andrews sets the figure from Boucher’s Study of a man standing, an actor in Les Fâcheux by Molière in an elaborate Rococo frame, but with a surreal ground visible in the distance. The figure is being transformed into a flower in a process of metamorphosis, of which there are many examples in Greek mythology. Metamorphosis is undergone variously as a punishment, as in the case of Minthe, lover of Hades, who was transformed by Persephone into a mint plant; to preserve a memory of the person, as with Narcissus or Hyacinthus; in an act of pity, such as the love-spurned nymph Clytie; and as protection, as with Syrinx in order to escape the god Pan. In his painting, Andrews suggests what might have transpired had Boucher encountered Aphrodite, a god he often conjured up in his work. He is using this rich history of symbols and meaning to process trauma by tying it into a collective narrative.

The exchange of ideas, techniques and motifs across time connects artists working today with the artists of the past. Imaginary Lines is a conversation about art and its purpose; about how to make art, and how artists employ a wealth of tools by whatever means they deem appropriate to express their ideas. Although the output of artists working today might look very different, with the modernisation of style, the invention of new materials and techniques and the scale as materials have become more accessible and affordable, essentially little has changed in the way artists approach their work and are motivated. To engage with art history is to talk to the dead, to learn from their mistakes and successes, and communicate to subsequent generations.