DRTP 3 (1) pp.

69–74 Intellect Limited 2018

Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice

Volume 3 Number 1
© 2018 Intellect Ltd Featured Drawings. English language. doi: 10.1386/drtp.3.1.69_7

Philip Tyler
University of Brighton

Drawing with words

Three years of a degree in fine art, two years of continuing to develop his practice and another two
years of an MA in fine art. What happened when artist Phil Tyler realized that his work has come to
nothing, that he was at a dead end? In 2016, Joe Graham stated, ‘As an artist who draws, I develop
serial drawing as a means to draw out my ideas from the process as it unfolds’ (2016: 60).
Laurie Preece, his MA tutor, had said to Tyler that ‘drawing did not inform his practice’. Faced
with such a predicament, Tyler began to draw to find his way out of this situation, to open up the
possibilities. His drawing contained words, sometimes so densely intermeshed that they became
indecipherable.
Impasse, a dead end, no ideas, blank. A creative block, where to go from here, what was the artist
seeking to do? Post MA, had the last seven years been a waste of time? Tyler found himself empty,
devoid of inspiration, bleak, introspective, a crisis of confidence. With no access to a studio, commut-
ing twenty hours a week on a train, Tyler used his predicament to make work. ‘It is proposed that
drawing, as knowledge and experience, is a particular way of coming to know the world that is expli-
cated within personal experience and practice’ (Ashton 2013: 2).
A small sketchbook, a studio. If indeed he felt empty, with no ideas whatsoever, then the idea of
no ideas became the topic of his drawing exploration.

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Philip Tyler

Figure 1: Philip Tyler, The Urinal of Words, c. 1990.

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 Drawing with words

Figure 2: Philip Tyler, Numbers and Letters Lose their Meaning, c. 1990.

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A five-centimetre square drawn in the middle of each page. What would go inside? Nothing,
emptiness. Using Letraset, letters are transcribed to the page. The frantic act if rubbing, causes the
words to fragment. Carbon paper is placed in-between the sketchbook pages. As a drawing is made
on one page, so a carbon copy is made on the other, a stage removed, a ghost-like trace of a previous
decision. The new text is added and the process continues unveiling histories, indecisions and
changes of mind. One is reminded of Diebenkorn’s pentimenti, ghost-like trails of charcoal lines
that add structure to his Ocean parks.

Viewing drawing through this temporal framework allows us to consider it as both an act that
takes place in the present as in the time of the drawing’s creation, while also being a trace of
this action, the record of a past event or gesture.
(Fay 2013: 12)

If this work was empty, then by applying text, meaning was added, confessional thoughts, state-
ments of truth, desires and opportunities, inner feeling and thoughts too personal to expose to the
world.

‘autographic’ drawing – the drawing that is confessional and biographical, based on an expe-
rience, a form of self-revelatory mark, an unmediated form of direct communication.
(Fay 2013: 16)

The act of drawing as catharsis. Tiny little sentences grew into narratives, which suggested new
possibilities. Words became indecipherable, the act of writing and overwriting letter forms transmute
into rhythmic structures. Words lost their meaning as they became more frantic and layered. Like
many voices shouting in a room their sense became lost in time. ‘The techniques of drawing and
writing have common origins in the desire of humans to express themselves and to communicate
with others’ (Fay 2013: 6).
The square and the subdivisions of that shape creates a rhythmic field, a static calm. It seemed
important to Tyler to have this constant frame of reference to hold but not always contain the drawn
marks. The use of white Tipp-Ex hid the meaning that was sometimes contained within. Like a
meeting between Robert Ryman and Arnulf Rainer, this drawing activity became a dialogue with the
self. ‘When we do not have the words to say something, drawing can define both the real and unreal
in visual terms’ (Kovats 2007: 8).
Over the course of a year and three sketchbooks later, gradually motifs began to form, a figure, a
tree, a door and a ladder.

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Tyler wrote at the time: ‘To deify the aesthetic is to seek revelation in emptiness, to create a false
prophet’. He was on the cusp of a new direction; a figure began to emerge out of this landscape. A
figure, which grew in scale and complexity. The figure was finding a way through this landscape of
memory seeking to find themselves in the confusion of words and images. How should this figure
be drawn, what would their role be, what did he have to say as an artist?
Since that time the language of Tyler’s abstraction – the grid, the square, the system and the rule,
as well as the cathartic attack, the visceral and gestural use of media – have formed his visual
language, but so too the desire to look outside of himself. Tyler draws obsessively, directly from
sources observed. 20,000 observational drawings later the sketchbook still acts as the studio, the
place to explore and to discover. Drawing is still one of the most important activities to him as an
artist; it is just that now he knows what it is he wants to say.

References
Ashton. A. (2013), ‘Drawing on the perceptual experience of form: An investigation of percep-
tion, ideation and practice’, Drawing Knowledge Tracey, August, pp. 1–15, https://www.scirp.org/
Journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=49390. Accessed 6 February 2017.
Fay, B. (2013), ‘What is drawing – A continuous incompleteness’, Irish Museum of Modern Art,
Dublin, https://arrow.dit.ie/aaschadpoth/16/. Accessed 6 February 2017.
Graham, J. (2016), ‘Time taken and time told: Serial drawing as the becoming of now’, Drawing:
Research, Theory, Practice, 1:1, pp. 59–78.
Kovats, T. (2007), The Drawing Book – A Survey of Drawing: The Primary Means of Expression, London:
Black Dog Publishing.

Contributor details
Phil Tyler is a figurative artist whose main practice is painting printmaking and drawing. He has
written two books, which were both published by The Crowood Press, on drawing and painting the
nude and the landscape. He teaches visual research at The University of Brighton, where he is also a
drawing researcher, with a primary interest in drawing pedagogy. He graduated with a MA in print-
making from Brighton and a BA in fine art painting from Loughborough College of Art and Design.
As part of his degree he studied in the USA. He has exhibited widely in the United Kingdom since
graduating, appearing in The Royal overseas league, the Discerning Eye, the Lyn Painter Stainers
and the Whitworth young contemporaries. He has also been featured in the Sky Arts landscape and
portrait artist of the year.

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E-mail: p.tyler@brighton.ac.uk

Philip Tyler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi-
fied as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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