Graeme drendel biography channel

Drendel always draws, in a sketchbook, the human figures he plans to put in a painting, even if he’s using a photograph as part of the process of working it up. (The painting The prize, for example, is based on a small black-and-white photograph the artist saw in an old encyclopaedia.) He determines the poses of his human figures from a model, customarily drawing Wendy or looking at himself in a mirror.

Drendel puts it down to Wendy’s natural, confident temperament that there are quite often partly-clothed women, like the one in Study for ‘Puppy school’, in his pictures. There’s a strong echo of Magritte’s La liberté de l’esprit about them, too; and the title of Magritte’s work, ‘freedom of the spirit’, is a very comfortable fit with Drendel’s painted ladies.

The woman in the Puppy school study looks enviably comfortable unclothed, as if she could walk around wearing nothing but her run-