from FIFTY DRAWINGS by Timothy Hyman

My drawing-life really began only in my twenties - that is, in the late 1960s, after I’d left the Slade. While making this selection, I’ve found I’m vividly recalling the moment when each drawing was made, and especially those early ones, nearly always fuelled by a rush of panic, an initial sense of floundering; of my utter inability to calmly build a “representation”. There are many ways of writing about Drawing that seem alien to my experience: as an “exercise”; as “analysis of form”; as “the probity of art” (Ingres’s phrase, famously set above the entrance of the liferoom at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts); as skill, or as “Discipline”. The experience of the world that I’m given is mostly too fugitive and transitory to fit any of those descriptions.
I’ve felt much closer to some of those definitions Bonnard came up with, near the end of his life, of art as “the Transcription of the Adventures of the Optic Nerve”; or as “Many Little Lies for One Big Truth”. A long-term collector of my drawings, asked to characterise them, suggested “Catching the Flow of Life”,
“a catching of phenomena in a few strokes, which is fresh and striking and may be revelatory. Here is something that seems peculiar to drawing, dependent on improvisation and speed of execution.”