Study visit - George Butler Anima Mundi

I'm already a massive fan of George Butler so this exhibition at the Bankside Gallery was a must see. Butler uses dip pen, ink and watercolour to record the everyday lives of people in areas of conflict. For drawings made in situ the works are large, generally bigger than A3 but many of them are made by sticking sheets of paper together including a memorable assemblage of A6 images which floated behind a sheet of glass called Let the bells ring - Biertan Church. I can't reference this directly but here is a list of all the images in the show (it's close to the bottom).

Butler has lots of interesting things to say about reportage illustration and how it can get a deeper understanding of a situation. This TED talk sums up many of them.  It's great to see the images in the flesh with marks from where the dip pen has dripped. He makes believable drawings but also mixes up sizes and perspective. Included in the exhibition are studies of animals in migration and in these there are small figures in the foreground and larger figures behind them. Some figures are unfinished and this gives energy to the scenes depicted.

Following my experiments with ceramic mugs I understood the difficulties of translating the large map drawing onto a globe, he makes a much better job of this than I did. Interesting that on the globe you can't get a complete view of what is going on.

Although many of the drawings are done in situ he does make work from these references back in  the studio. Some of these combined collaged elements using found objects and others had cut outs of drawings overlaid onto other drawings. I like these combined images which tell a more detailed story.   There were also some drawings on coloured paper which is a technique that I'm fond of. They didn't have the same punch as those with a white background but a more mellow relaxed tone.

Unfortunately the exhibition was only open for 5 days so I feel very lucky that I was able to visit.