Meet my guest for December's Live Zoom
“Orchestrating the madness that is the modern world in drawings is a wholly fulfilling thing, even when those gross absurdities only touch on dark and true realities.” — Louis Netter
Dear On the Spot members,
Leave all your preconceptions about reportage drawing and urban sketching at the door and join me Dec. 21 for our last Live Zoom of the year. It’s going to be a good one. (Members: Find the link to register at the bottom. Non-members: You can book a $10 ticket on the Sketcher Press website to receive the Zoom link.)
Louis Netter, a reportage artist and Senior Lecturer in Illustration at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., will give us a sneak peek into his fascinating new book, “Reportage Drawing: Vision and Experience.”
Netter says the book brings together the findings from his doctoral degree. It touches on big questions that often spark interesting conversations among sketchers:
Is reportage drawing about the subject or the experience of drawing?
What role does caricature play in reportage drawing?
Do reportage drawings need to have a certain aesthetic?
Netter defines reportage as the fusion between observation and comment. The reportage artists he admires are not only recording scenes through observational drawing but also offering pointed commentary on the reality before their eyes. Jill Gibbon, Gary Embury, Loup Blaster and Mercy Kagia are some of the artists he featured in the book.
I can’t wait to talk with Netter, whose reportage and illustration work stopped me in my tracks when I discovered it. Here’s a a powerful example from a series of drawings he did in Barcelona, the city where I was born and raised:
Netter’s reportage can also be appreciated in “Coast of Teeth: Travels to English Seaside Towns in an Age of Anxiety,” a book co-authored with Portsmouth writer Tom Sykes, and in the blog that he has kept for years, Life’s Too Short for Nuance.