Jim Savage (1950–2019) and David Lilburn (1950–2021) were passionate about drawing, structuring their lives around its practice, promotion and conceptual contemplation. Beyond their individual outputs, their collaborative promotion of the medium through Occasional Press allowed audiences to engage with landmark publications such as Berger on Drawing (2005) and Drawing Texts (2001). Savage held a quiet conviction about drawing. His modest demeanour shielded a fierce lifelong commitment to his chosen art form.
David Lilburn, by contrast, was a force of nature. He was constantly active in new drawing series, printmaking cycles and graphic-design collaborations with the University of Limerick.
His vast output can be traced through numerous public commissions and print editions, all springing from an innate desire to map his place in the world.
In 1984, Lilburn’s naked self-portrait with erection, on view at Limerick’s EVA International art exhibition, caused a furore. When a local café owner announced he was coming to the Limerick City Gallery of Art to destroy the portrait, a Limerick paper alerted EVA chairman Hugh Murray and a press photographer captured the scene of Murray wrestling with the café owner Dick Coughlan to stop the work being destroyed.
Writing in the catalogue Into Landscape (2007), Savage quoted art critic John Berger: ‘A drawing of a tree shows not a tree, but a tree being looked at.’ One might expand upon this unwritten implication: a tree being looked at by another person. That presence filters directly into the page. Ultimately, every drawing becomes the site of this profound entanglement between the drawer and the drawn.
The two artists’ joint exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art (10 September – 8 November) will notably highlight Savage’s later landscape pastels, which beautifully retain his core draughtsman’s sensibility, alongside Lilburn’s vast body of drawings, prints and notebooks. Not to be missed.
Mike Fitzpatrick
