Four intrepid HB’ers set out on 27 March 2019 to Paris, despite travel disruption warnings from Eurostar, to see what is described as the must see event in Contemporary Drawing: namely DrawingNow and DdessininParis. They are the leading contemporary art fairs in Europe dedicated to drawing.
Thursday 28 March started with a visit to the Paris College of Art to meet Chloe Bridges of Drawing is Free and take part in an hour of drawing the figure. We each took turns to model and the duration of the pose was dictated by a song. The session was rounded up by being taken to the top of the college to admire the view of Paris from a series of wonderful chimney pots to Sacré-Cœur Cathedral.
We then travelled on to DrawingNow to view the work followed by a drawing performance by Nikolaus Gansterer. Our wander around the fair started with some beautiful drawings by Antony Gormley, Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon shown by Caroline Smulders (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac).
We ended the day with a walk to a studio squat where every surface of the building had been painted and one could see the ‘Outsider’ artists at work. We clocked up over 16,000 steps with our travels that day!
On Friday 29 March we headed out to the Ddessin fair housed in a beautiful space under the windows of the Atelier Richelieu in the heart of the capital. Again many beautiful drawings to view and artists to converse with. We even managed a short spell of drawing in a quiet garden space before heading back to the Gard du Nord to catch the Eurostar back to London.
Luckily, we managed to slip through the expected travel disruptions to arrive back in London an hour earlier than originally planned. We’re already looking forward to a return visit and perhaps to other collaborations with artists in Paris who love drawing as much as we do.
HB 