Looking at Hewitt's sketchbook pages created on a tour with the infamous Irish punk band, The Pogues, in the map briefing presentation, it hit me profoundly how every drawing is a map. Every mark on the page is a result and documentation of the situation the drawing was made, the sounds, the atmosphere, the surroundings of the creator and their mood, the nature of the subject, it's moment and energy and form; every single thing effects how that image is going to manifest on the paper and thats a very powerful and deeply interesting concept.
This is especially apparent and true of reportage drawings, observational drawings, drawings made from life possibly of moving subject matter or done in little time, as the artist just captures a loose overall depiction of the subject. The pages of Hewitt's sketchbooks are full of very expressive, gestural black line drawings of the band members and scenes from the tour, some very abstract and skewed, some areas of detail and some of almost indistinguishable anatomical forms; scribbled arms and wobbly legs, evidence of the human hand and eye and mind working in unison, suggestions of where the subject had moved half way through, forms layered on top of each other. All of this along with random dots and lines where Hewitt has perhaps slipped or been pushed or been drunk, a visual map of the scenarios in which the images were created, but an abstract, ambiguous map. It is up to the viewer to piece that scenario together, to build up a mental image of what caused the marks on the page, why they are there, how they were created.
This creates an image and story behind every drawing, but one which doesn't actually exists, which occupies the space beyond (or behind?) the drawing; the telling of an untold narrative.
As Hewitt himself said on the sketchbook, 'Facial features were rendered through twists and jabs; postures were often stiff, body parts out of proportion and forms determined by a clogged or flooding nib. As Shane’s response to the Hanley sketchbook testifies, those portrayed continued to perceive a deliberation in any drawn representation, and flawed or roughly rendered marks might be read as commentary while I regarded the unintentional marks as souvenirs of the event of the drawing’s making. To leave a drawing in the state of its immediate production was, for me, an honest record – not of what I had seen but of what I had done in response to what I had seen.'
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