Nick Wadley - archive

This catalogue documents the life and work of Nick Wadley: his beginnings as an artist, his translation/transition into an art historian, and many years later, his return to drawing as his principal activity. Wadley wrote 12 books, many articles, gave countless lectures at Chelsea School of Art where he taught from 1962 to 1985, and elsewhere, and curated exhibitions. He became an authority on Impressionist art and his book on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Drawing is a standard text. As well as an archive of Wadley's life and work, this volume acts as an eyewitness to the worlds of art and writing in London and beyond, during Wadley's lifetime, and the publication's extensive index is a who's who of these realms. Wadley drew throughout his life but sometime in the 1980s, he realised that he could say something different with pencil on paper, something that neither texts nor theories could reach. He started to draw full time, even though the occasional reviews and articles continued to appear. The significance of the drawn line emerges in his critical writing in general, even when the word 'drawing' isn't mentioned. A drawing can be read, described, analysed, dated, compared, but it resists complete exposure. It is a language of hints, secrets and incomplete revelations. And, if it moves us, we may not know why. Nick Wadley's drawings are of objects, faces, scenes. Whatever they are of, their characteristic signature is the combination of despair, surprise and uncertainty. There is also the occasional intrusion of words to amplify or to contradict what is seen, and his 90 recent sketchbooks are a dictionary of visual possibilities. In all this, puns and humour are the order of the day. Some of the themes of Wadley's work were suggested in his dreams. Under his pillow was a notebook, a sketchbook, a pencil and a rubber.