National art school winners share the spoils

BY ALISON MASSEY
For the winners of the National Art School’s Drawing Week Prize, hanging their works in the Xavier Art Space at St Vincent’s Hospital became an unlikely social event.
‘When we were putting up our work, we had so many people stop and chat to us,’ says Rita Karagelinian, who is one of the prize-winning artists. ‘A lot of the staff would ask ‘Oh, what are you doing” Everyone was really interested, because I think it’s like a little community in there. I mean, if you’re there in hospital for a long time, it’s almost like you live there. So when something new comes along, like a new artwork going up, it’s like a buzz goes into the day.’
Rita Karagelinian is one of four student winners of the Drawing Week Prize: a month-long exhibition at the hospital supported by the Friends of the National Art School not-for-profit charity, FONAS, and the St Vincent’s Campus Art Committee.
Students of the National Art School (NAS) in Darlinghurst begin their yearly studies with a week of drawing as a way of brushing off cobwebs from the long summer holidays and kick-starting creativity for the new academic year.
This year over 200 students from NAS descended on Cockatoo Island in February for Drawing Week 2008. It’s the third year the school has used the island, and the students agree it’s a great place to spend a week drawing.
‘Everything’s there,’ says Ana Robson, another of the prize-winning students. ‘There’s the convict gaol, the ruins there, there’s the ’50s buildings, you’ve got the industrial cranes’ You can do anything you want to.’
As well as getting the students back into the creative swing of things, Drawing Week reinforces one of the school’s key principles: drawing as the foundation for all artistic practice.
Lynne Eastaway, Head of Drawing at NAS and co-curator of the exhibition, says drawing is the tool that underpins everything the students do.                                                              ‘It’s the core subject, along with art history and theory. They do it all the way through their undergraduate course. In first year they do nine hours a week drawing, second and third years draw six hours a week. It’s with them the whole time.’
It’s a message Eastaway’s students take to heart: ‘Drawing is a fundamental aspect of all disciplines,’ says Karagelinian. ‘You need to know how to draw to be able to paint or sculpt, or even photograph – it’s all about composition and space.’
And for Ana Robson, the exhibited drawings can play a valuable role outside the studio.
‘I guess for me or for anyone, if it can evoke something, if it has someone look at something that they’ve seen all their life in a different way, well then, I think that’s it.”
‘ The NAS Drawing Week Prize Winners 2008 Exhibition, showing at the Xavier Art Space, Level 4, St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst.