The Grain in the Light is a revealing look at the art of Toronto-born drawing master Paul Young whose work has not only inspired several generations of students and colleagues at OCAD, Three Schools and elsewhere in Toronto but redefined, on its own terms, the practice of charcoal drawing and fine art calligraphy as worthy of the same interest and consideration as other better-known forms of Canadian visual expression.
Intently aware that the practice of drawing itself had been relegated to an inferior expressive status mainly because of technological innovations such as photography and commercial imperatives in the expressive arts, Paul Young has, throughout his career sought to reclaim the position of prestige once accorded to the practice of fine drawing, as a legitimate and necessary form of cultural expression, which, when practiced at the highest level, yields a distinctiveness of vision unavailable in any other medium.
Employing a technical approach steeped in his personal search to understand and convey the texture of light itself, what Mr. Young literally sees as the “grain in the light,” the artist has developed a personal method of “high definition drawing” which captures the integrity of his realist vision in renderings of exquisite detail and veracity.
Ever searching for the transformative catharsis of vision unconstrained by fashion or convention, Paul Young has focused, throughout his career, on three major sources of inspiration for his work, namely the human body, animals and nature itself, submitting each to the unremitting rigors and demands of their own essences.
In viewing the work, we experience the large nude drawings as they explode off the page in an ecstatic celebration of the human form while the animal drawings, not content to emulate the mainstream pastiches of the genre, offer unique insights not only into the appearance of the animals themselves, but the individual specificities and characteristics of their individual nature. Still, it is perhaps in his nature drawings that the range and depth of Paul’s skills is most accessible as these drawings contain areas of high definition set off against the broader expressions of gesture and calligraphy bound by a deep sense of order and composition.
Along with the drawings themselves, the film contains interviews and commentaries by mentors, friends, acolytes and fellow artists whose reflections on Paul’s work help further redefine the ambitions of fine art drawing itself. From the first frame on, The Grain in the Lightis a sustained meditation on the nature of how and what we choose to see and a celebration of perhaps the most enduring of forms of cultural expression in which entire worlds are summoned into existence, to quote the painter Anne-Laure Djaballah, in When a City Dreams….
