Louis Netter

University of Portsmouth

Louis Netter, BA(Hons), MA, Senior Lecturer in Illustration at the University of Portsmouth: Education: University Loughborough BA (Hons) Illustration, Educational certificate Parsons New School of Design, MA College of New Rochelle, MPhil/PhD candidate at Royal College of Art. Trained as an illustrator, animator and designer with over 10 years of experience teaching in higher education. As an illustration lecturer, I bring my extensive professional practice in the field of illustration and my passion for nurturing and inspiring young creatives. Current research is on the role of drawing in design education, reportage drawing and the development of visual language, and practice based research into graphic novels. Artwork is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, New York Historical Society and many University libraries across the USA. My first graphic novel will be published in 2015.

Abstract:
The illustrator as author in a dialogic exchange with place in reportage drawing

Reportage drawing is a complex activity bringing together several layers of experience, acquisition, intention and reflection. Through my own practice, and the practice of other reportage artists, I seek to identify in the reportage act the simultaneity of seeing and depicting that reveals the inherent strategies, both intentional and intuitive, that are manifest in visual language. It is my contention that the visual language of the reportage artist is imbued with intent and that the artist is pursuing and extending highly personal themes in these drawings. This is particularly true of the reportage drawing that I engage with. My reportage drawing is heavily editorialized with my own visual language resembling a consistently applied graphic vocabulary, simultaneously rendering form and comment. In fact, I contend that visual language emerges more out of the necessity of comment than purely stylistic concerns. The feedback and dialogue that occurs with the environment is key as it shapes the way the work is formulated and how it develops alongside the artist’s own sense of place (and the allegorical gestures to society at large). Specific examples of artists engaging with locations (of their choosing) will be examined with specific attention to the myriad of decisions made in the in-situ drawing experience.

Through the lens of my own experience and drawings (among others), I will reveal that the nature of drawn visual language as represented in reportage drawing, reflects a salient truth that is anchored in the specificity of an actual observed moment. Reportage drawing derives its power from the corporeality of the image and an awareness of the hand behind it. To clarify and distinguish from the traditionally held conception of ‘reportage’ as it normally relates to photography, drawn reportage is the highly idiosyncratic rendering of not a specific moment in time and place, but the experience of that moment.