Trevor Dance
Trevor Dance is a retired lecturer in adult education, where he taught literacy classes and GCSE English. He described himself as ‘useless’ at drawing at school, and had not done any artistic activities since then until, at the ripe old age of 62, he arrived at Maggie Jennings’s evening etching class...
I had been writing articles about artists for ‘New View' magazine – I have always been fascinated by the visual arts. I got to know about Rodolphe Bresdin through researching Odilon Redon (Bresdin was his teacher and mentor) and I felt – and still feel – that his work was very under-rated and that he deserved a monograph.
In order to write the book, I realised that I needed to understand and experience the techniques of printmaking. My thought was that I would do an evening class for a term and that would be that. Our dear friend, Google, helped me find The Royal Drawing School. This was in September, 2012. I have not missed a term since then!
As well as having been useless at drawing, I was also fairly hopeless at practical things and using tools (I have always hated DIY). Maggie was so helpful and forbearing – as all the teachers, especially Rossen Daskalov, Martin Shortis and Massimo Franco, have been since then – that I was, to my amazement, able to make progress. I never thought I would even make anything I would want to put on my office wall – now it’s covered with my efforts. I was astonished when my prints were accepted for exhibitions. The whole experience has been quite life-changing in a very positive way.
I have also done an evening drawing course with Daniel Miller and Johnny Dewe Mathews – Drawing Space: Interior and Exterior, which was highly enjoyable and helped my confidence with drawing in public places, however unfortunately I only have time to be a one-day-a-week printmaker. One of the joys of printmaking is that it is a dialogue with drawing and as Henry Moore remarked, drawing is much more than just looking – looking does not have the ‘grit’ in it that drawing has. I like art to be imaginative - and drawing and printmaking enter a different, and important, way of thinking to that of writing – a process that should never be under-valued.
You can read more about Trevor's monograph: Rodolphe Bresdin: An Incorrigible Bohemian via his website, where you can also see more of his etchings.