Through an intuitive and gradual process, British artist Alison Lambert reworks and layers her monumental drawings of heads and figures, resulting in profound meditations on what it is to be human.

he notion of an inner spirituality is always in

Alison Lambert (b. 1957), Erato, 1993.
Charcoal on paper, 49 3/16 x 44 in.

my mind when I'm drawing the figure, but not in any religious sense," says British artist Alison Lambert. "I would like the viewer to see my drawings as a portrayal of what it is to be human."
        Lambert was born in Surrey in 1957. Soon after graduating from art college in 1984, she became a founding member of the Coventry Canal Basin Trust, a group of artists who restored a historic but derelict canal-side warehouse into a complex of studios for artists, designers, and craftspeople. She has had her studio there ever since.
        At an early point in her career, Lambert veered away from oil painting, finding she much preferred charcoal; recently, she has combined charcoal with black pastel. The drawings she makes on thick, soft watercolor paper are unusually large: Her drawings of heads tend to be about fifty inches square, and her full-figure drawings measure about eight by five feet. They thus have the monumentality of a mural.
        The artist's style, though always representational, has evolved over the past two decades. For years she portrayed human figures and animals such as horses or bulls in brooding settings that evoked a mythic past. Faces had generalized features and for the most part were expressionless. (An exception was the intense Erato.)

Marsyas, 2000. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 53 3/8 x 46 7/16 in.

        In the late 1990s, however, she moved away from portraying universalized human types to exploring individuals, seeking to reveal their frailties and vulnerabilities as well as their strengths. A trip to the Ile-de-France in 1997 led her to create a series of heads. As art writer Alan Dyer notes in Alison Lambert: The Human Image, what particularly inspired this was the carved heads of figures on the portals of Chartres Cathedral. He describes her as deeply moved by "the depiction of real human beings, who were enduring hardship or anguish but who, nevertheless, communicated an inner spirit or vision which transcended their earthly suffering."
        Lambert goes through an extremely arduous process to produce a drawing. She usually works from more than one model, and gets ideas from photographs she has taken or found that in some way resonate with the mood or emotion she intuitively grasps as her theme. In the effort to bring her initially rather vague mental image into full manifestation, she draws over areas of the face or figure many times, rubbing out passages and redrawing until she must resort to affixing small strips of fresh paper to the surface. The process continues--redrawing, ripping, scraping, and layering--creating an almost sculptural surface of frayed, stratified paper covered with shadings of black and gray. The result is a profound sense of presence. Each drawn head or figure is virtually the imprint of a soul, with the artist's laborious process seeming to echo the decisions, thoughts, and feelings that through a lifetime have subtly engraved themselves on the person's spirit.

Phaedra, 2000. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 22 7/16 x 22 7/16 in.

        "I feel I have to gradually construct the figure," Lambert told Dyer. "I don't make corrections, rub out, stick new paper on and scrape areas off just for effect. I don't like having to do it but there seems to be no other way for me to get the figures right." She laments that she is not a fluent draftsman who can capture the essence of a figure in a few strokes. Yet her painstaking process reveals human nuances that blither artists often miss. She seems fairly reconciled now to the "battle," as she calls it, of making a drawing. Although she uses models and photographs as referents, she mostly summons each image from within, seemingly from the depths of the unconscious. The translation into charcoal on paper comes through gradual, piecemeal, hard-won revelations, and her method suits this well. She told Dyer, "What began only as a solution to my lack of skill in draughtsmanship has become a process that allows me to express my feelings through the drawings."

Ezra, 1999. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 34 1/4 x 33 in.

        It seems paradoxical, she says, "that at a time when people are saying the drawings are getting more accomplished I'm finding the process of making them more difficult, hence the increasingly torn, broken up surfaces." When one compares her recent work to her rather cold, formulaic drawings of the eighties and early nineties, however, one can see that this more demanding process is perhaps the result of Lambert becoming ever more sensitive to the human heart and spirit. She has increasingly subtle, complex, and moving things to reveal about what it is to be human.
        Lambert's work is handled by the Jill George Gallery in London (www.jillgeorgegallery.co.uk). The 2002 book Alison Lambert: The Human Image, published by the Coventry Canal Basin Trust Ltd., is available through the gallery.
--The Editor