Artist : Roy Eastland (b. 1964)
Title : Displaced Portrait (Woman from Brünn, 1942)
Medium : silverpoint drawing on gesso on board
Size : 21 x 15 cm


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“‘Displaced Portrait (Woman from Brünn, 1942)’ is one of an ongoing series of silverpoint drawings based on portrait photographs taken mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, which have found their way into my hands via a second-hand shop in my home town of Margate. My drawings are a kind of meditation on these displaced traces of lived moments. This particular drawing is of a woman who, judging from the hand-writing on the back of the source photograph, was a German-speaker living in Brünn (now Brno) in 1942 in what is now the Czech Republic. At the end of the war the ethnically German population was expelled. The piece has been repeatedly drawn onto with points of silver wire, drawn into with needles, and scratched-away with scalpel blades and sandpaper. The image goes through a continual process of repeated loss and re-finding. With each re-working, certain details change; but always the repeated point of reference is the original photographic image. Whatever it is that I’m trying to see seems always to be elusive. Each re-working points to the same thing but each re-working is also a different drawing adding something new. I draw in the hope of catching sight of something which I could not have foreseen but which feels somehow true. These drawings are worked on over the course of many months and often years. Some never reach an end-point. Hand-made drawings remind us that there is always another way of seeing and that there is always another way to mark those moments of recognition. I wonder who it is that I have drawn here.” - Roy Eastland 2021

Roy Eastland lives and works in Thanet, Kent. He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1996. Works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibition including the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, The Jerwood Drawing Prize (on three occasions), The ING Discerning Eye Drawing Bursary, The Zoo Art Fair, Miami Art Fair, The London Art Fair, The BP Portrait Award, The British Art Fair, The Hunting Art Prizes, Margate Rocks, the Turner Contemporary Open, among others.


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