On a visit to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, I visited an exhibition by the Chinese artist Xu Bing. Like many artists and inellectuals, he spent many years during the Culrutal Revoliution working in the fields and lving in poverty. However, he seems to have kept drawing through the years, producing beatiful and detailed pictures of everyday Chinese objects - such as kitchen equipment, and local sceens - with whatever materials came to hand.
The early drawings, from the age of 14, are very impressive and show a mastery of technique, often just using pencil on scraps of paper. The later pictures are freer (he was influenced by Andy Warhol for a while) and some of his woodcuts are really charming in capturing anything from a riverside scene in Beijing, to a pig suckling her young, to a woodyard with piles of sawn logs.
The real lesson for me was the fact that good technique can overcome lack of good materials; that drawing involved a lot of hard work (which I've learned over the last year!) and that virtually any object or scene offers artisitic possibilities.
If you've not seen Xu Bing, take a look at his work. It's very inspirational.
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