John Stanfield, Luke Thurgate and Chelsea Lehmann interpret Courbet’s ‘The Artist’s studio’ using chalk on school blackboards. The provisional nature of chalk recalls the histories of preparatory drawings, and the ‘working out’ that blackboards are frequently used for. While white chalk (mineral calcite) readily adheres to paper, on blackboards it barely clings, allowing for quick, unfussy changes and softly cumulative passages of tone and line. The artist’s work together using addition and erasure to find a settling point in which each other’s marks vie for the image in a process of lost and found gestures and open-ended transformation.
Open NAS campus hours March/April 2023
