About

The illusion that forms, words, characters are fixed helps us to navigate the world — albeit drunkenly. 
The opposite is at the heart of my work.

A fiction I hold from time to time is that for years I did not draw. 
I have drawn for much longer than I remember:

People
Buildings
Rivers
Hills

But words for years were my constant.

Drawing is another way of thinking.  I returned to it again more deliberately through printmaking and for a while I thought of myself primarily as a printmaker.

I begin a drawing through observation, but observation is only a beginning — a prompt rather than the territory.  In general I don’t aim to reproduce what I see; rather, I wait for a drawing to evolve from what I see emerge through the initial stages of its destruction.

I lay down charcoal, wipe it away, layer, erase
layer, erase
score into it
burnish, draw over

I work with the side of charcoal, resisting the certainty of its tip and move through the drawing — sometimes from the hand, sometimes from the hip.  Sometimes a drawing escapes me. 
More often it pulls me in.

Julian Brasington
Llanfairfechan, North Wales