Demystifying Drawings #23
Friday, 1 August 2025. Newsletter 23.
On 27 June, the artists Nicholas C. Williams, Joana Galego, and Pippa Young joined Annette Wickham, former Curator of Works on Paper at the Royal Academy, for Timeless Materials – a panel discussion on drawing materials, techniques, and practice, held in partnership with The Drawing Foundation as part of the live events programme for the Trois Crayons exhibition Tracing Time.
Drawing has always been central to Williams’s work as a painter, and one month on, he revisits some of the questions raised by Wickham during the discussion and reflects on his own approach to drawing.
Could you describe the role of drawing in your current practice and how it has developed in this way? Which historical artists and drawing techniques have you gravitated towards in particular? And what have those interactions brought to your own work?
All my work, whether painting, sculpture or print, begins with a drawing. For paintings, I make initial sketches from imagination in small sketchbooks. The immediacy of drawing, particularly with charcoal, allows the transfer of images from thoughts to paper almost in real-time. Once I settle on a composition and the characteristics of the figures, I will ask people to pose who share those characteristics. Following the working methods of Caravaggio and his followers, I don’t make extensive preparatory drawings; instead, I refer back to the small sketches and draw from the model directly onto the canvas. Likewise, I sketch in other elements that I might need, such as still lifes, garments on lay figures, and so on, before underpainting.
I also regularly draw in response to seeing a particular subject or to hold onto a moment. And it is this aspect of drawing that I often gravitate towards when looking at the drawings of other artists – from Degas sketching a friend, Constable making a study of a tree, to Rubens drawing his young son. Such drawings represent flashes of intense observation that not only reflect a moment in their lives, but through the sense of familiarity resonate with our own.
How much did your training influence your approach to drawing and your interest in the art of the past? Are there historical techniques and graphic effects that you have found particularly resonate with your work?
As a child, I developed an interest in the work of the Old Masters through visits to the National Gallery, and so my training in drawing was invaluable. At sixteen, I joined college and was introduced to the principles of life drawing by a rather stern, but excellent elderly tutor, William Randall. The emphasis was on deep observation – seeking out volume through contour, knowing when to introduce weight to a line, and drawing on point. We had classes three to four times a week, working in silence with different models – one of whom, during every break, reminded the class he had posed for Augustus John, a statement that was unfortunately wasted on us.
When drawing from life, it is crucial to spend as much time looking as drawing. A wonderful example of the looking-to-drawing ratio is a sketch that Joana chose for our conversation – Rembrandt’s Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk. The subject demanded that Rembrandt observe and draw swiftly. As with all such sketches, determining the speed at which an artist worked is only an assumption, since we can never be certain how long they spent looking before making the next mark.
Perhaps the greatest lesson for me from studying Old Master drawings is their approach to rendering the figure. Generally, they worked from dark to light with descriptive passages of lines that follow form and reserved parallel shading for suggesting tone. It is a method shared with the painters of the Baroque, where the brushstrokes follow form – and there is no better example than examining the surface of a painting by Jusepe de Ribera.
Rembrandt, Two Women Teaching a Child to Walk, British Museum, London
Does it make a difference to you to look at original artworks where possible rather than from images?
While books are a vital resource, nothing competes with looking at the original for scale and touch. And there is also the mysterious charge that some drawings possess when you encounter them. After seeing original drawings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele made on toned packing paper, I experimented with such papers – eventually sourcing a robust acid-free packing paper which I now use regularly.
Is the 'timelessness' of drawing and its materials significant for you?
When an artist draws, they are at their most vulnerable. Unlike painting, there is nowhere to hide, and a lapse in concentration will leave a trace. Lines reveal a hesitant or an assured hand, and the exposed nature of drawing means we are literally looking at the evidence of time preserved in every mark. And it is perhaps this element of drawing that makes Old Master drawings both elusive and compelling.
Nicholas C Williams, Sheet from pocket sketchbook: Initial sketch for a painting (2017), charcoal and pastel, 10.2 x 14.7 cm
How do you avoid pastiche when engaging with historical artworks? When is copying a good or useful thing, and when does it become problematic?
I have borrowed both overtly and subtly as a way into a work. However, there is always the danger, when borrowing components of an existing drawing or painting, of succumbing to pastiche. And appropriation is a slippery word – Pippa described it as sampling, which feels right. It is certainly a futile exercise to try and emulate the Old Masters; however, I am interested in employing their working methods to express thoughts and concerns about the here and now.
The works of the Old Masters are imbued with a sincerity of mark-making, driven by the purpose of a work. By contrast, I find it problematic when some contemporary works purport to be from life and yet are clearly copied from photographs – betrayed by affectation and fake pentimenti.
Are there any artists, past or present, who you think should be better known for their drawings?
To a wider public – Rubens and Annibale Carracci for their sheer intuitive brilliance; Watteau for the humanity that permeates almost every drawing that he made; Piazzetta for his understanding of reflected light and his ability to close in on the figure while conjuring whole scenes within a confined space; Käthe Kollwitz for her raw power; and Adolph Menzel for his tireless curiosity – the belief that every person or subject is worth drawing and for having eight pockets in his overcoat to carry his sketchbooks and drawing materials.
The event recording of Timeless Materials will be uploaded to the Trois Crayons website in the coming weeks.
Nicholas C Williams, Point (2018), oil on canvas, 107 x 138 cm
