Interview & photography: Brooke Rutner

Drawing as the Destination:
Studio Tour with Serena Thomson

Serena Thomson is an artist and arts educator. Her professional experience in the social justice sector can be detected in her overall philosophy of creation. “It's important to create environments where we can experience creativity collectively, and learn from one another.” Serena’s lyrical drawings not only draw us in as a viewer but also invite us to pick up a pencil and participate in the process. 

Could you tell us about your new series? There appears to be a stylistic depart from your previous work.
I'm moving further from realism toward the sensory, emotive or remembered encounter with the subject. The hardness of the forms I draw is dissolving, and the linework has become faster, more confident and gestural. The new series is of imagined landscapes. The scenes arise from the pure pleasure of using oil pastels - drawing a metre-long scarlet red line is fun - memories of places, sketches I made outdoors and fragments from photos.

You have an interesting philosophy on drawing. Could you elaborate?
Drawing is something we all do, from sketching a map to doodling in a notebook. From this basic impulse, drawing takes on so many different forms. When someone says "I can't draw" they're saying they can't draw in a way that meets their expectations, which is often a realistic form of drawing. To be confident at drawing, maybe you need many hours of practice, or maybe you need to widen your definition of what drawing is.

Anne Carson describes a good poem as "an action of the mind captured on a page," an action that the reader enters into. I think of drawing this way. There's a satisfying directness and physicality to drawing - there's no intermediary when you push a penTcil across paper. There's also an intimacy because the artist's hand is much more visible. Like in Carson's poem, the viewer can enter into the action of the artist's thinking.

What drives you to educate?
I educate as part of my art practice to open avenues for others. What they discover down that avenue could have a huge impact on how they experience the world and what they believe is possible to create. For many years I was unaware of the full possibilities of drawing, and early discoveries really blew my mind. It's important to create environments to experience creativity collectively and learn from one another.

Has your experience working in social justice informed your views?
When I was really young I thought I couldn't contribute to solving problems I saw because I didn't have all the answers. Then I learned that even a small contribution…is really valuable. I volunteered with an organization that supports asylum-seekers and my one job was to help them fill out a long, complicated government form. That's it. I didn't have to be a human rights lawyer, just committed to putting the empathetic and listening skills I already had into service.

You could be holding onto something that's a missing piece for someone else. What is it, and how could you share it? Art makes indescribable things visible. You don't have to be an expert in all things, but make art about the thing you know is true, or teach the thing you know is true.

This is an interesting period in human history. Separated from the external environment, many people are, perhaps for the first time confronted with internal world. Do you see a connection between confinement and creation?
There's for sure a positive connection between solitude and creation. I can only access certain parts of the creative process in an unbroken stretch of time alone. That said, you're referring to this specific moment we're in, where confinement is not a choice. It's been brutal to be cut off from our social worlds, and many of the activities that give our lives meaning. Creation can be a survival tool in this context. Through creating, we can make sense of our internal worlds and have a physical record of our experience. Creating feels good.

What is your favourite colour?
Yellow ochre.
Practically, a useful intermediary colour that I use as a bridge between other colours. Emotionally, pure condensed summer sunshine.