"Bicycle Life Drawing" was an event I designed and produced for a Friday Late at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was inspired by Surrealist drawing techniques and played with the format of a classical figure drawing class.
Over 100 participants joined three separate bicycle life drawing sessions in the Raphael Gallery. The bikes were a mix of very rare antique specimens from a private collection and new Bobbin bikes.
Easels and chairs were positioned in the round, with the life model substituted by a bike.
It was the perfect event for me as I got to combine my bike design and production knowledge with my love of life drawing.
Bicycle Life Drawing
Concept & Design
“One of the purposes of drawing is to train us to understand through observation.
Like the figure, a bike is an animate object. Drawing a resting bike can help us to understand how it’s made and how it works. Like the figure, bikes are very hard to draw. They have a skeleton (frame); straight lines and curves; joints (lugs); legs (stays); a back end; an inherent latent strength; and a capacity to move and power forwards.
Bikes are holistic: each part of their design relates to, and relies on, the others. Because bikes work with (and mirror) human bodies, a used bike can contain subtle clues about it's past owners. From these you can start to piece together the bike’s narrative: the journeys and adventures it’s been on.
A beautiful bike is much more that the sum of its parts: it’s a balance of aesthetics, form and function. These things, coupled with the animation that comes from human use, are what give a bike its unique character - its soul. As your pencil takes its own exploratory journey across paper, these mysteries will begin to reveal themselves”.
