While art critics have often pitched drawing and photography as a dichotomy, Drawing from Nature fuses the two. The artist places photographs of city scenes on a sheet of black paper and then draws with pen and ink from the organic aspects of the photographs. Volcanic rock pitted with holes that form the corner of a gutter, water streaming down the gutter, plants, and limestone cliffs provide a starting point for the drawings which extend outwards and defy the rectangle of the photograph.

The series points to the importance of nature in the concrete jungles that have become our cities.

“This Lloyd Godman exhibition again shows that crisp, clear vision we have come to expect from his work, Auckland seen from the ground up as no Aucklander sees it. This is not so much a homage to the city as a delightful, quirky, outsider’s view. There is something at once amusing and provocative in this vision of our Queen city. This is not a glossy presentation of the “City of Sails” but rather a city in decay, or at least a place reminded of its eventual past. 

Detail and texture offer us visual questions which have become the trademark of Godman’s work. In this exhibition he complements the photographic/drawn questions with a catalogue that deepens and sustains this questioning. Catalogues can help or hinder the understanding of works. Some indeed render images the viewer judges clear, totally opaque! This catalogue reveals the artists intent, his philosophy and the links these have with the images presented. 

Here photographs no longer can be discussed as records of the past but, by combining the drawn image, they become prophecies received from the past. Godman presents to the spectator a vision of the moment and complements that instant of communication with deeper questions within the catalogue. 

Nature here is observed from an often-idiosyncratic angle, liberated from the confines of the rectangular format. Added to the photographic image is a drawn one, lovingly detailed and richly textured, emphasising Godman’s photographic trademark.

What is clearly important are the questions we are confronted with”.

 Ken Laraman