Grahame King

Author Jane Eckett, in examining the role of drawing in an artist’s life, suggests that for Grahame King it represented much more than simply a means of describing the world. It was his way of learning about the world and then synthesising observation, thought, feeling and intuition. The book traces the many ways in which drawing led King to the arts of monotype and lithography in which he became a master printmaker. The book begins with 1940s sketches of soldiers, shearers and dockworkers and then moves on to his wonderful pen and wash jottings of European architecture and scenery encountered during his travels in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The images reveal the artist’s transition to printmaking techniques which exploit the confidence with colour, line and form that the constant practice of drawing helps to generate. His later ink and wash studies of Phillip Island penguins have all the fine gestural qualities of Oriental calligraphy.