While primarily known for his sculptures – including the Angel of the North (1998), which is considered a national landmark in the UK – Antony Gormley has experimented with different mediums over the course of his career. Drawing in particular has become an essential part of his practice. As Gormley himself has reflected, ‘Drawings have immediacy. In a good session, drawing can be like going for a rugged, physical adventure on a blustery day with changing conditions of light and rain. A day passed without drawing is a day lost.’
In Drawing: Antony Gormley, the artist explores drawing as a vital form of thought and feeling, offering an intimate and enlightening window into his artistic vision. Featuring over 400 works from the 1980s to the present day – many previously unseen or unpublished – the book offers a deeply personal insight into his process, including reflections on the possibilities of drawing. Accompanying Gormley’s writings are perceptive texts by Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Iversen, Daisy Hildyard, W.J.T. Mitchell and Merlin Sheldrake, who offer a unique perspective on Gormley's work and the wider meaning of drawing as an act of exploration and transformation.
We stopped by Antony Gormley’s studio to speak to him about his new book and explore how drawing has contributed to his personal and artistic journey.
Left: Page 103, Continent, 1989, Earth, rabbit-skin glue, oil, black pigment and charcoal on paper, 380 × 280 mm © Antony Gormley | Right: Page 73, To the Ends of the Earth, 1987, Black pigment, linseed oil and charcoal on paper, 538 × 406 mm © Antony Gormley
You’ve described drawing as a journey into ‘the unarmed parts of our internal landscape’. What does drawing in practice mean to you personally?
Antony Gormley (AG): Drawing is about going on an adventure. You’re trying to be somewhere with this emerging world that is arising on your piece of paper. I want drawing to be what it can be: immediate, surprising and arising in the moment. It’s not about drawing for something; it’s drawing for drawing, the very first sign of materialized thinking.
My first drawings that are really worth looking at are from the early 1980s. I started with charcoal and thick black oil paint on paper, and that was very deliberate. The early drawings are diagrammatic, and I was thinking about light and dark, open and closed. The journey I’ve been on is to be less diagrammatic, less certain, less about trying to work things out, and more about trying to find what happens when you allow material to behave as it wants to behave. So, in broad terms, my journey has been towards greater and greater fluidity, both of material and of ideas.
I want drawing to be what it can be: immediate, surprising, and arising in the moment. It’s not about drawing for something; it’s drawing for drawing, the very first sign of materialised thinking. Antony Gormley
What constitutes a good drawing? For me, a good drawing gives you a new feeling or a new idea – and that’s more important than all other qualities that you perhaps might judge as critical: does it look like a body? Does it look like a landscape? Does it look like a building?
Those concerns are less important to me than the immediate impression or feeling of something.
What constitutes a good drawing? For me, a good drawing gives you a new feeling or a new idea – and that’s more important than all other qualities that you perhaps might judge as critical: does it look like a body? Does it look like a landscape? Does it look like a building? Antony Gormley
Page 126, Present Time, 1990, Carbon and casein on paper, 150 x 215 mm © Antony Gormley
How does working with different materials help you express that inner exploration? Are there certain materials that feel more intimate, immediate or challenging for you?
AG: Drawing is a form of thinking, but it’s also about the medium – using the intrinsic qualities of substances and liquids, a kind of process that requires tuning into the behaviour of materials as much as to the behaviour of the unconscious, like reading images in tea leaves, trying to make a map of a path of feeling, a trajectory of thought.
It’s important to me that the substances I use to draw with are not taken for granted, and casein, linseed oil, milk, semen, blood, coffee, chicory, earth, varnish, all come with their own qualities, extracted from the body of the earth, from the body of plants, or from living bodies.
Drawing is a form of thinking, but it’s also about the medium – using the intrinsic qualities of substances and liquids. Antony Gormley
Inside spread from Drawing: Antony Gormley
Do you believe drawing can be an activity of connecting with the world and the people around you?
AG: Yes, and you could say it starts with noticing what’s happening in a pigment puddle bleeding into a piece of paper, but it connects to playing with puddles on the ground, greeting people in the street, engaging with the life around you. In cultures that do not rely exclusively on the hermeneutics of language and are not overrun with instantly made mechanical images, drawing serves as a vital way of communicating. If you visit Menzies in Western Australia and talk to the Wongatha people, often, as they speak to you, they’ll sweep the sand, take a stick and draw with it, while telling a story of land and country. Drawing becomes as much a bridge from my experience to yours as speech, cooking, singing, or making music. My passion is that drawing be nurtured as something as natural as breathing.
Left: Page 18, Untitled, 1982, Black pigment, linseed oil and charcoal on paper, 647 × 497 mm © Antony Gormley | Right: Page 288, Hold I, 2022, Inkcap on paper, 387 x 280 mm © Antony Gormley
What do you hope readers will take from the book?
AG: I hope that anybody, having looked at this book, will grab a brush or a stick of charcoal and draw. If you give a child anything that can make a mark, whether it’s a pencil, a biro or a stick of chocolate, they’ll draw with it. Then, at a certain point – maybe at the beginning of formal education – they back away from that excitement of making a whole world on a sheet of paper. I don’t want any of us to lose the intimacy of the drawings we made as children. My greatest hope is that in engaging with this book, people will want to draw.
My greatest hope is that in engaging with this book, people will want to draw. Antony Gormley
Drawing: Antony Gormley is available now
