In 2021, James Gosling, The Artist in the Gallery Hall was awarded the Discerning Eye Drawing Bursary. You can find out more about the prize on the dedicated Bursary Page.
Setting the Scene
Even as someone who loves to draw, I was never the sort to visit galleries to study and learn from the works of the masters. I thrive on drawing but freely admit that I bore easily when facing down national collections and the like.
Once upon a time
I lectured in web-design at an international university in Marylebone, North-West London and would habitually choose to walk there from Victoria in lieu of proper exercise. The route took me westward through St. James Park via Trafalgar Square.
On one such occasion, with time to spare, I must have made a tour of the National Gallery collection. Memory is a little sketchy but I replay it now as something along the lines of the record-breaking nine minute tour of the Louvre scene in Godard’s A Bande A Part.
I recall
I cued up Van Halen’s visceral opus, Woman and Children First, to soundtrack my propulsive route through the galleries dramatically offsetting the sombre ambiance and driving me excitedly along those massive halls.
I only stopped in my tracks to make a sketch of a guided tour group crowding El Greco’s Christ Driving The Traders From The Temple. With this impromptu tableau vivant, appealing to my illustrator’s eye, a seed was sown that would prove to be particularly fertile a few years along.
One Christmas
my beloved gifted me a series of drawing classes in East London. When the course was complete we chose to continue regular sessions together at The National Gallery. As I worked that first day, recalling the hurried visit and impromptu sketch made some years before, I decided directly that more than just the individual paintings would be my subject. I claimed the gallery as a second home.
Early one morning
some years later, upon entering the Sainsbury wing, far down the road of my new life as the most hardcore of National Gallery drawing regulars, I came across a frail and deflated, elderly visitor on a bench, darkly winter-dressed during the sunniest UK May on record. The impression was that she had elected to come here and to perish at The Nativity of Piero Della Francesca.
While rudely drawing this moving happenchance, an on-duty guard, familiar to me, enquired in the moment as to whether I had purposely set the scene, such was its unlikelihood.
I have spotted the frail visitor since – before our COVID-19 times at least – slightly more buoyed and composed, but this did not alter the affect of that sombre, serendipitous moment.
Pre-pandemic, I traipsed the gallery halls almost daily, seeking out affecting narratives for my drawing pleasure. Making three, four, or more pieces each visit, the drawings piled up. A few stood out. The Sleeper [Nativity of Piero] is certainly one of the more affecting of these pencil-punctum happenchances.
For Jackdaw Magazine, 2021
Q&A for Framd [the art sales App]
What do you love most about being an artist?
My first memory of praise and appreciation was drawing at primary school. Subsequently, I was always consoled by pure painting and drawing. As I grew older, I felt the pressures of an expectation to compromise commercially, leading to a choice of Illustration rather than Fine Art as an area of study. For many years, I put drawing in the background. Now, thankfully, it is very much to the fore and I draw every day, associating it with a great sense of freedom and broader life fulfilment. I also appreciate the privacy that being an artist brings and this extends to how I market my work.
Did you study art before becoming an artist?
Yes. I began my art and design studies at Kingston Polytechnic in the South East of England, moving on to a commercial art degree at Maidstone School of Art – for a long time now part of the Kent Institute, and then on to St Martins College, where I took a post-graduate diploma in Advanced Illustration – I feel very fortunate that I was able to fulfil my education uninterrupted at a time when you could study without the burden of student loans.
Is art your full-time job?
That is my goal. Right now, I draw every day, but also practice and teach web and graphic design, trading as SCHEIN and devising designing and developing original sites for individual artists, small boutique businesses and, most recently, a fledgling record label called Needle Mythology, currently in the ascendent with a reissue of FINN by Crowded House founder Neil and brother Tim aka The Finn Brothers.
Have you always worked with pencil?
Yes. I have drawn from life in sketchbooks on all my travels, since my teenage years. The pencil is the most economic means to facilitate this.
What inspires you?
I get great inspiration drawing frequently at The National Gallery. I am excited by the activity around me and by the visitors watching me draw. The gallery is the perfect place for me to feel driven, where a pleasurable tension is created – the constant stream of visitors set against the drama of epic subjects and the gallery interiors, enhanced by a driving soundtrack – all these aspects contribute to a heightened, anxious excitement, something I use as a stimulus. Often, I achieve a state that is a kind of ‘jouissance’ as the French have it – a physical and intellectual pleasure or ecstasy. I use and enjoy the tension enveloping me to draw extremely quickly. Such frenetic activity is at odds with the stillness I might experience art-working in the studio.
Where else do you draw?
Frankly, I enjoy drawing wherever I happen to be – train stations, in cafes, parks. In such places, I tend to draw at intense speed, often creating quite detailed images in a matter of minutes, working with a pencil in either sketchbook or at larger scale [A1/ A2] and might occasionally use Adobe Photoshop to add colour and other forms. All these situations present the constant challenge of catching people in their day to day activities – my favourite subject.
Who are your greatest fans?
Due to the frenetic nature of the drawing, my pieces often portray fragmentation and I tend to attract buyers who are comfortable with these layered and often chaotic representations. Interestingly, the more fragmented works seem to appeal to a majoritively female audience.
Original Interview – 2019 on Framd