Individualism, playfulness and semiotic complexity are all to the fore in a highly finished drawing of 1969 that encapsulates the way that Greaves had reformulated his visual language. A manifesto picture, The Pleasures of Drawing (1969) is the most finished of a series of works showing an easel with a picture on it and can be read as a surrogate self portrait. The easel stands in for the artist and a bird in flight represents painting as an act of liberation.
The Pleasures of Drawing also plays games. It plays formal games with the parameters of the picture and the transparency of forms, but also games with what is real and what is imagined. Is what is represented a bird that flies past or is it a picture of a bird? The conceit is shared with Magritte's paintings of a canvas before a window and Braque's atelier paintings, with their interpenetrating forms and leitmotif of a bird in flight. Yet in its linear emphasis the work also exemplifies the concerns of Derrick Greaves. For, whether drawing or painting, Greaves places a strong emphasis on the animation of line, pictorial flatness and visual wit.
Provenance
Private Collection, Norfolk
Literature
James Hyman, Derrick Greaves:From Kitchen Sink to Shangri-La, Lund Humphries, London 2007, illustrated p.98.
Derrick Greaves, The Pleasures of Drawing, James Hyman Gallery, London, 2005, illustrated front cover and (cat. 1), illustrated (un-numbered).