Since the early 1980s, David Connearn has established a distinct and intriguing manner of drawing. It chimes with one of the tenets of conceptualism of the period, in that the mechanical process may be reduced to relatively few words. Examples such as “Walk in a straight line for ten miles,” “Bury a kilometre metal rod vertically in the earth” condense the objectification of time and energy to ciphers. Sol LeWitt, famously, was able to have assistants on other continents build his constructions and install his wall drawings in his absence by following more-or-less unambiguous instructions sent through the mail. So, for David Connearn: take a sheet of white drawing paper, typically square, of any size; demark a work area within a border; draw a freehand horizontal line at the top of the work area as straight and level as possible, using a Rotring pen; draw a second line below the first, as close to it as possible without touching; repeat until the work area is covered.
I got to know the work of David Connearn in the mid-’80s, when he worked on one of his largest drawings for around six weeks of the summer at Coracle on Camberwell New Road, in a front gallery turned studio. The paper was a massive eight-foot square. A mechanism of rollers and pulleys enabled the paper to be gradually raised so that the section being worked on was at eye level, and resting on an angled drawing board.
What emerged over that period, one line at time, was extraordinary. From the outset, there was something quite intrepid in the first mark, the first short length of black line, on that great expanse of white, the first sled-track in virgin snow of an expedition setting off from base camp. Over the days and weeks, as the drawing gained complexity, there was much to think about. The artists’ position, of total focus, of the endlessly repeated single task, had a clear affinity with Buddhist meditational practices. But that held as long as he was drawing an endless single line; here, at the end of each line, the paper might be shifted up a fraction, and a new line begun, but now, rather than that first freehand line, the path of the pen stylus was dictated by the coordinates of the line above, and by the discernment of a consistent, just-white, just-space between the lines of ink. The first line, being guided by eye, had its slight deviations, which had to be accommodated in the next, and so on, down the paper, the revelation of some very human imperfections and imprecisions in lines that tracked sentience like the needle of a seismograph.
This final drawing was if I remember rightly one of a series of five, distinguished by variations in pen nib width. Other series have been completed on other sizes of paper. All of them, all of Connearn’s drawings, reward much scrutiny. They are a kind of meditation in themselves, in which we read what we will of sections of lines that are fractionally closer or looser than others, of those deviations in line that exaggerate and those that diminish, as though we might find some direct access into the mechanisms of the artists’ cognition. There is nothing representational in any of this, of course, but it is hard not to think of the banding of tree rings, of the accretion of layers of sedimentary rock. The evidence is all here, but at the same time is almost beyond us. It is like trying to hear music by studying the grooves on a vinyl disc.
Years after the Coracle drawing, I visited David Connearn at his beautiful house in Deptford, where I was amazed to find that his drawing had shaped a building, the studio in his garden. It is a lovely box of glass and birch ply, with an exterior clad in burnt Sugi wood. Much modelling was done to enable the right spread and intensity of day light. In an update of John Soane’s experiments with light importation at his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there is a curved light scoop and ceiling reflector, that spreads the top light across the working wall surfaces. The scrolling and positioning mechanisms improvised in Camberwell are here sophisticated, with for instance a drawing easel that slides out of the wall surface. It is fascinating to witness a building dedicated to such singular purpose.