Rectilinear Personality Biography – Babette Wagenvoort MA RCA
1970
- Born in Voorburg, The Netherlands
1973
- I make a red pen drawing on sugar paper of people on mopeds.
1995
- In my third year at Art College (AKI, Enschede) I’m trying to
keep my personal life outside of my work. I get stuck because all the
work I end up making seems very superficial. At the end of a very memorable
tutorial mentor Wouter Hooijmans’ brief is: “make one drawing
a day, about that day.”
- I find the drawing I made when I was three years old. Trying to recapture
the purity of that early work I start drawing with red pencil on thin creamy
paper.
- The drawings are good therapy
1996
- A style is developing: a thicker line shows shadows on a face or an object.
- An interest in ‘grids’ and ‘boxes’ becomes apparent.
- The drawings are less about therapy, more about themselves
- Exhibition in ‘7514BK’ in Enschede, NL, celebrates the publication
of ‘Rechtlijnige Persoonlijkheid’
1997
- I’m trying to make ‘dramatic things’ happen in my life
in order to have something to draw about, so I stop diary drawing. I do keep
using red, because it has become the colour of honesty, focus and ritual.
1998
- Because of the amount of events we have to attend as RCA students it often
feels like I’m not doing any real work. By doing one drawing a day a
pile of drawings builds up on my desk. The series turns out to be probably
the best one yet.
- I stop ‘explaining’ the drawings, believing that it is irrelevant
why I draw something, but very interesting what a particular viewer thinks/feels
the drawing is about.
1999
- Dissertation for the RCA called ‘Private Worlds’, about autobiographical
influences on the work of Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Marlene Dumas
uses comparisons between written diaries and visual diaries
2000
- At ‘The Show’, Royal College of Art and during ‘How Deep
is Your Love’ at the House Gallery in London I invite people to make
their own diary drawings.
- I make an interactive movie for WHSmith’s about how people communicate
within the company - drawn in red lines using similar imagery to my diary
drawings - an experiment in making ‘diary drawings for other people’.
Shown at ‘AKI Ontplooid’, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, The Netherlands
(2002)
2001
- Drawing from memory workshops at the Drawing Research Centre at the RCA
and with my students at Camberwell College of Art
2002
- Re-drawn diary drawings (in watercolour) shown at ‘City of Westminster
Arts Council Open Exhibition’, London
- Start of the latest series
- Drawing According to a Rectilinear Personality Workshop at Buffalo State
College (USA)
