A solo exhibition by Jessica Staple ​ This exhibition celebrates a love for drawing, particularly rapid life drawing.  With life drawing, the drawer expresses what they observe immediately around them. Rapid life drawing is what the name suggests – it is fast. In the time it takes someone to pass by or complete an action, the drawing must be near completion. This is complicated still further when you draw outside or in a public space.  The activity requires rapid decision-making and responses that are intuitively felt, rather than consciously deliberated. In a constantly changing environment, there is simply no time to agonise over each mark made, over colour, or composition, or likeness, or what looks right or wrong. Second-guess yourself or stare at the page too long, and you will miss key gestures, movements and characterisations, many you may not even be consciously aware of until you draw them.  It is a well-used expression that drawing relies on practice. And yet, even if you have been drawing regularly, vision and human perception – which is connected to the body, memory, beliefs and the imagination – is not formulaic. It does not function like a camera, and life drawing is not a mere automatic response to stimuli. Although it requires constant exercise in the same way an athlete must train their muscles to perform specific actions without thinking, drawing relies on the training of conceptual, perceptual and physical muscles, all of which must operate simultaneously.  Life drawing, because of its immediacy and accessibility, offers us a unique way of exercising our perception, which is singular to every single human being. No two people will ever see or draw alike. Life drawing requires you to concentrate in a unique way in order to make sense of what you are looking at. You must mentally break it down into parts and essential, defining qualities or characteristics. Drawing induces you to question what you are looking at and, in doing so, you begin to appreciate its character and uniqueness. And the more you look, the more you will see. Not only this, but you will want to see more and challenge yourself. A whole world opens up to you. It’s the same old place, but the way you look at it has changed. Drawing awakens the drawer’s curiosity and teaches them to re-evaluate the things they may take for granted. Further still, in the physical drawing, you get to see how you see, and how your perception changes or evolves. You are thus not only getting to know your environment; you are also getting to know yourself.  More often than not, the physical product is less satisfactory. I am rarely satisfied with my rapid life drawings. And yet, somehow, I feel that I am improving all the time. Each time I draw, I learn something new. I see something I never saw before, or I see it differently. Or it is like seeing something for the first time. In the end, the product of drawing is less important than the process and what is gained by it. The almost child-like curiosity cultivated through drawing is well worth the hardship of constant failure. In fact, failure is absolutely necessary. Drawing is not about perfection or copying. It is about searching, always searching, and acknowledging that there is still a great deal you do not know, or will remain invisible to you, until you give it your full attention.  Apart from my own enjoyment of life drawing, I have always taken it for granted that drawing is a visual artist’s most important skill. However, more recently I have tried to go beyond the obvious and find a more nuanced and satisfactory language to articulate this value and understand more clearly why I am so ‘drawn to drawing’. Moreover, why drawing still matters, not just for artists and art schools, but everyone, particularly in the age of rapid digital innovation and artificial intelligence.