Tenfold • Marjan Wouda
When I finished my secondary school education in the Netherlands I opted out of applying for art school. Though I had always loved drawing and making I didn’t rate myself among those so talented that art school was the obvious route to take. Furthermore, I reasoned that I lacked the life experience to know what it was I needed to express.
I came to the UK to seek the experience that I was hungry for. It offered a place far enough away from home, where it was possible to do interesting things in the voluntary sector and where my command of English wasn’t too much of an obstacle to doing challenging work with people. Having been thrown into the thick of it I soon rediscovered how important drawing was to me as a survival tool and an activity that was more rewarding than any other.
I believe I have a poor visual memory and at school we were expected to be able to almost solely work from memory. Here I quickly learnt that it was all right to draw from observation. Charcoal became my favourite medium as it allowed me to almost model the forms I saw and reveal the play of light and shadow on objects. My favourite subjects were the cows on our dairy farm back home. As they were stabled in winter, the light from small barn-windows caressed and emphasised their curvy and bony forms.
I could have become a painter were it not for the fact that I had a fascination with the clay that surrounded us back home, and for the guidance I received from the head of the art college I was attending in East London, Simon Lewis. He nudged me in the direction of the sculpture studio, pointing out that my drawing revealed an interest in 3 Dimensional form. Having arrived there I never looked back.
I drew my first particularly meaningful animal at a time of personal turmoil. It was an image of the stray city dog I had become aware of lurking around the areas where I lived in West Ham and in Manchester and it was an expression of the artist in me, shadowy but with a strong drive to survive. It was an inspiration, a personal symbol of true significance and an image of great power. I realised that human experience and emotion could be explored through animals – as they had been since time immemorial – and that at this level art was at its most powerful and could speak to all. I delighted in the expressive potential of posture.
