Come Draw with Me. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
June 2013.

"The Ashmolean continues its series of LiveFridays in June with a special partnership with the Campaign for Drawing celebrating the drawn line. Come Draw with Me builds on the Ashmolean’s holding of drawings and coincides with the major exhibition Master Drawings. As home to one of the world’s most important collections of works on paper, the Ashmolean’s Come Draw with Me will marry the museum’s own collection with the LiveFriday ethos of inviting visitors to ‘do’ as well as ‘see’. Artist led drawing demonstrations and workshops will explore myriad techniques and materials used by both artists and draughtsman throughout history.

Come Draw with Me will be curated in association with the national charity, Campaign for Drawing. As a precursor to the Big Draw in October, this LiveFriday explores the use of drawing as a tool for thinking and creating. Individual artists will lead workshops and demonstrations for visitors to participate and explore a variety of materials and techniques.

Reflecting on the use of drawing in relation to the written word will be the theme of artist Tamarin Norwood’s video installation. Alongside Tamarin’s film projection, Keeping Time, poetry group Oxford Stanza 2 will present their new work, Traces, written in response to Tamarin’s video artwork, and run workshops to invite visitors to write their own poems. For those wanting to leave their mark, artist Miranda Creswell will be inviting people to sketch small landscape scenes which will be linked together by their horizon lines to create one large panorama.

Artists choose different materials to draw and during June’s Come Draw with Me a number of artists will show this variety. Cathy Miles will demonstrate how to draw with wire. Building on her special interest in European ceramics, Cathy will use the Ashmolean’s ceramics collections as her inspiration for the evening’s workshops. Likewise, Adrian Brooks will invite groups to try their hand at drawing on graphic pads. Thus illustrating that whilst the tools draughtsmen use develop with technological advances the concept and importance of drawing remain the same.

Throughout the museum spaces, artists will be inviting visitors to leave their mark. It is hoped that by the end of the night there will be lasting memories of the event with large scale drawings recording Come Draw with Me. Steven Follen will be working with visitors in the Forecourt to produce a large scale collaborative chalk drawing inspired by patterns from the Islamic Middle East gallery of the Ashmolean. The museum’s collection will also be explored by Chichi Parish who will be inspiring LiveFriday visitors to create cartoon strips taking inspiration from the collection. Meanwhile, Weimin He will be working with dancer Aimee Payton and groups of visitors to explore an artist’s ability to draw movement in the Chinese cursive calligraphy style. His workshop will bring calligraphy, drawing, dance and music together.

Visitors to Come Draw with Me can enjoy the on-going exhibition Master Drawings. The Ashmolean has one of the world’s most important collections of drawings and this exhibition will select some of the finest examples of works on paper by artists including Raphael; Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and Michelangelo; Rubens and Rembrandt; Turner, Degas and Cezanne; to Gwen John and David Hockney".

Templates were lasercut from plywood then the geometric designs added to assist participants with their designs.