Michael

Heindorff

INTRO
PICTURES

STATEMENT

BIO

The drawings exhibited here both complement and contrast with Heindorff’s City panoramas. Urban quarters from a range of different cities are seen through windows, forcing the viewer to think about spaces, insides and outsides. In these drawings, however, the inside spaces seem to loom larger than before, but is this a retreat from the urban scene or a way of recording cities from a more interesting viewpoint? Michael Heindorff sees the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ as balanced. He writes:

"Of particular interest to me is drawing from within an interior through a window which leads on to a view beyond: the 'Here' and the 'There' in all its rich and mundane, almost unattended, nothingness.

My drawings are made in one on-site session of uninterrupted and continuous drawing. One day, one subject: the simplest of working frameworks. The method is a fast translation of what has been observed into visual equivalents: it is a form of handwriting made up of linear and tonal notations. The pencil offers an opportunity to scrutinize, dig into visual discoveries and simultaneously rush across the paper leaving a rudimentary trace.

Whilst working I tend to lock into the subject that exists in front of me (a plain drawing board resting on my knees), seeing and drawing it whilst omitting the objects that pass through the image and don't belong for more than a fleeting moment. The concentration allows an ever-more surprising encounter with detail that might easily be overlooked or taken for granted.

But sticking with it turns even the most ordinary and boring view into a sensational feast of visual poetry: rich both for the experience of seeing and the making of the drawing itself. A draft, for instance, might swing a glazed window panel on its hinge so as to further open or narrow the view (as in the Florentine - and Vienna interiors). Responding to such changes with a rapid pencil shows the fragility of an image and its transient dynamics. That which was then real is suddenly overlaid by a reflection of an image we cannot otherwise see.

My drawing is about the appreciation of the unprecious. And it is about imposition and retreat. I remember drawing the curtains in Prague with the most whispering tenderness, being gentle with the long, floor- to-ceiling mesh of fabric as it appeared to softly veil the secret destination of the tram tracks beyond".