Drawing from Clouds: Workshop with Mark West – 18 April 2026
Drawing from Clouds
Saturday 18 April 2026
11.00–16.00
8 Smart’s Place, London WC2B 5LW
Book a place here
On Saturday 18 April, architect Mark West will lead a workshop at Drawing Matter using a method he describes as ‘Drawing from Clouds’.
This drawing method relies on precisely the same perceptual trick as seeing the ‘man in the moon’, or seeing animals or faces when staring long into clouds. Seeing recognisable patterns in a disorganised, random, or meaningless field is called Pareidolia, and is a natural way of seeing for pattern-seeking animals like us. This approach allows you to see things, and draw things, you did not know; it is simultaneously invention and copying; a curious mixture of careful technique and automatic freedom.
The method is as old as the hills, used not only by the Surrealists, but no doubt by the makers of prehistoric cave paintings, and certainly used by Leonardo DaVinci who gave the following instructions in his Advice to a Young Painter:
A way of developing and arousing the mind to various inventions
I cannot forbear to mention among these precepts a device for study which, although it may seem but trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless extremely useful in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, when you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautified with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement; or, again, you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could reduce to complete and well drawn forms. And these appear on such walls confusedly, like the sound of bells in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.
We will work with prepared paper, a cloudy surface of powdered graphite. We will not set out to ‘make a drawing’ but instead to try and understand what we see, and how we respond to what we see. We don’t know what the results will be.
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Since 1981, Mark West’s practice in drawing has preceded and accompanied his technical inventions in fabric-formed concrete architecture. A former professor of architecture, he now lives and works in Montréal Canada at his Atelier Surviving Logic, and since 2023 as co-founder of Ceci n’est pas un musée, a miniature cultural institution also located in Montréal.
Drawing Matter’s public programme offers the public opportunities to experience our drawings collection, which is usually only open to researchers by appointment and for student/practice workshops. Events take the form of talks at the archive, workshops by practitioners and open weekends.
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