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Keynote Speakers
Within the field of fine art practice, Professors Deanna Petherbridge and Stephen Farthing both
hold positions that make specific reference to drawing. Petherbridge, a practicing artist, and a
leading authority on drawing through her curatorial work on the seminal exhibitions Primacy of
Drawing and The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy, is Professor of Drawing at the Royal
College of Art. She has a particular interest in the 'mutability' of readings that might be made: ‘It is
the openness of drawing to amplification and to completion in the mind of the spectator which
creates the unique possibility of a state of urgency … or its inverse, stasis or deliberate repose.'
(Conference paper, Huddersfield University, 1998.) Farthing, as Professor and Ruskin Master of
Drawing at the University of Oxford, held an important role as ‘guardian’ of Ruskin’s legacy, and
has been actively involved in pedagogic discussion of drawing and fine art at a national level. His
own practice has been described in terms of an interplay ‘between narrative significance and
illusionistic devices’ (Allen Millen, Art Review). The third fine artist was Professor Mary Kelly,
perhaps best known for aspects of practice not associated with drawing. Her focus on language,
on linguistic construction rather than content, suggested that she would make a challenging
contribution to the symposium.
Keynote speakers from philosophy, psychology, and engineering were selected to broaden the
context of discourse. From structural engineering, Brian Forster, of Ove Arup & Partners, was
anticipated to bring reflection on a discipline where drawing serves a dual role, as a conveyor of
precise information, and as an integral part of design processes concerned with imagining the
unseen. From the domain of psychology, Norman Freeman, Reader in Cognitive Development at
the University of Bristol, was recommended. In Visual Order: the nature and development of visual
representation (1985), Freeman explores the production of depictions, describing pictures as 'the
product of human labour rather than leaves torn from the book of nature'. His research interests in
experimental child psychology, in language, cognitive development, and reasoning, was expected
to provide a useful contribution, balancing the models from Freudian psychoanalysis which have
been prevalent in contemporary theoretical discourse on the visual arts.
For a philosophical perspective, a contribution was sought from Professor Richard Wollheim,
author of Art and its Objects (1968), On Drawing an Object (1965), and Painting as an Art (1987).
Wollheim's previous work, and the attention he has given to the role of cognition in perception,
was expected to provide a firm basis for consideration of all the approaches represented at the
symposium.
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