How to draw a prize ….

Saatchi Online has just announced the winners of a Drawing competition called Drawing Showdown, which ran online and produced some weird and wonderful images including some really fabulous drawings. Many of the works challenge what one might consider to be drawing, but I think the results are all the more interesting because of that. There is straight objective drawing, conceptual drawing, three dimensional drawing,….and everything in-between. Dexter Dalwood was the judge of the final selection, while a larger group helped with the shortlisting, including public voting online. The much deserved winner Ernesto Walker, is clearly exercised by the black cloud that hovers over his region of Mexico, (he lives in Monterrey) where violent death is common for those involved in drug trafficking and illegal border activity. Ernesto has somehow encapsulated the violence of a set of murders in an intense way, focusing on the destruction reaped by the bullets in each case. At the same time, the composition, and the regularity of the whole seem to attempt to impose a calm structure over the horror of the reality and retain a sense of mystery and confusion too. There were ten finalists, There are the obsessive pencil drawings, such as Scott Hollingsworth’s large scale depiction of a fantastical planet from above, and for me, the more moving Dirk Dzimirsky’s work whose prize for Black Sun (depicted here) has an intensity hard to achieve in photography, but through painstaking hyper-realistic drawing, manages to gain a sense of presence that challenges two dimensions. The other finalist that drew my eye was Juliette Losq’s Wunderkammer, a pen and ink drawing installed as peeling wallpaper, the drawing referencing out of fashion wallpaper decoration and romantic landscape drawing of 18th century.