Drawn to You
There are those people who doodle, and there are those who draw. As G&C’s Steve Benn opens his sketchbook to us, it is clear that a doodler, he is not.
Illustration and painting have always played a huge part of Steve’s life. “At an early age it allowed me to combine two of my loves – drawing and cars,” he explains. He set his sights high right from the beginning, sketching Porsches and Lamborghinis, paying close attention to get the proportions right, before shifting the focus of his subjects to surfing and ocean-scapes.
After entering the design industry, Steve found he had neither the time nor energy to continue drawing. “In a world where we ‘swipe’ and ‘tag’ to navigate around our virtual lives, there’s a nice familiarity to putting pen to paper.” And it was with that in mind that Steve returned to drawing.
Currently enamoured with the technique of pen and ink, Steve uses the humble black biro, to make light hairline marks before building them up to create darker tones. Says Steve, “whilst it’s quite time consuming, I find it gives the work a depth that you can’t achieve with other mediums such as pencils.”
Having always been drawn to black and white portraiture, something about the duality of light resonates with him. Reinterpreting portraits usually sourced from the web, Steve says his aim is to be as true to the original image as possible, but there is always an intangible difference between the two.
What draws Steve to this particular form of creative expression? “Drawing for me isn’t about the end result, I’m more interested in the act itself. It’s a cathartic process, a form of meditation where you can forget about external factors and focus on the moment. In the future I’d like to use some of my own photographs as the basis for these drawings.”