'Drawing Comparisons' exhibition : from an interview by Dianne King, 26.03.97

The drawings by sculptor Stephen Collingbourne are built in a similar way to sculpture but without any obvious concern with mass and volume. He trained as a painter and has spent many years making two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional works. He sees drawing as an opportunity to explore different aspects or developments not possible in sculpture. His sculpture is contemplative, intellectual, pared down, whereas the drawings are more emotional and sensual, especially in their use of colour. As well as being more spontaneous than sculpture, drawings can form a continuum of formal ideas that can be sustained in short bursts of activity. To create three-dimensional works in metal, as Collingbourne does, however, one has "to make an appointment for it and get on all this kit" - sculpture is a time consuming business.
The content of both his drawing and sculpture comes from landscapes and memory. Specific places and experiences are abstracted, made more general and accessible. Hills and valleys in Corsica, the map of Devon, views from his windows are distilled into simplified and condensed forms.
"Although my work appears 'abstract', many of the forms have evolved through my experience of living in a variety of environments. [For example,] a preoccupation with contrasting curves and straight forms stems partly from Far Eastern architecture and calligraphy...."
Increasingly, these are inverted landscapes, "landscapes of the mind" rather than observed ones. They look inward as much as outward. The forms are deliberately ambiguous and capable of more than one reading, often resembling those in his sculptures.
Collingbourne shares with Matisse and Hodgkin not only an exquisite sense of colour, but also a fascination with windows and frames within frames. Like Hodgkin, he uses colour to create mood, ambience and a certain nostalgic feel. A sense of time, too, can be conveyed through colour - the yellow of glorious childhood summers, the blues and purples of twilight. In Collingbourne's drawings, the exhuberance and panache of the colour are held in tension with very ordered forms.
Drawings might be cut up and reformed into new works, with the different components clearly visible. The combination of large planar areas with more detailed linear elements seems to relate to his earlier steel sculptures which were elegant drawings in space. The austere, volumetric aspects of his recent sculpture are echoed in the series of black and white drawings where the flat dark sections are built up with many washes to give a density of tone comparable with the restrained patination on some of the sculptures.
Collingbourne uses a variety of media and of methods of starting a drawing - he often begins with a monoprint which is drawn onto. He finds pencil inhibiting, preferring to make lines with a stick, the end of a paintbrush, scissors or knife. "There should be nothing you're not allowed to do". The cutting is drawing as much as the markmaking is.

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