Ronald Noorman makes drawings. In the past, while still at the Rietveld Academie and in the years shortly thereafter, he produced graphic work.
These days, he is occasionally seen to be putting some lost property together to make it into an assemblage, but drawing is his métier. It has been for a long time. During the early eighties, when Noorman first exhibited his drawings, it was far less common for an artist to be so doggedly involved in the art of drawing than it is today - perhaps in part thanks to him? -, but it is still unusual.
Traditionally, there have been two types of draughtsmen: those who use their drawings to give form to their ideas for a painting or other work of art and those - less numerous - who engage in drawing as an autonomous activity. Noorman belongs to the second category. In the past, there have been artists, who, for a period of time and for various reasons, made drawings instead of paintings or etchings. A well-known example is Jan van Goyen: dozens, if not hundreds, of his drawings have been preserved dating from the single year 1653, whereas his paintings from that same year can be virtually counted on the fingers of one hand. Then there is Adriaen van Ostade, who in 1672, the Dutch 'Year of Disaster', sought refuge in the Amsterdam home of his patron. Since he did not have a studio at his disposal there, he made a virtue of necessity by exclusively producing drawings. Such examples are the exception, however.
Ronald Noorman, on the other hand, has chosen drawing as the primary vehicle for his imagination. What attracts him in drawing is the directness of the medium. Drawing reduces to a minimum the distance between idea, hand movement and the sign appearing on the paper, from the perspective of both time and space. The technical tools - pencil, crayon, watercolour, gouache - are a lot less inflexible than oil paint, copperplate, or stone and naturally lend themselves more easily to experimentation: failures or rejects are referred to the bin. However, drawing knows no mercy; wiping or covering up of errors is virtually impossible.
Moreover, it seems as if the viewer is able to look over the shoulder of the artists; that is how direct the contact is. The slightest hesitation, mistake or change of mind is immediately observed.
Noorman makes full use of this directness and intimacy. In the years in which he dedicated himself to the art of drawing, he developed great virtuosity, which he subsequently ignored as much as possible. His style of drawing may seem hesitant, as if he explores the image created by bis hand at touch. Sometimes the touch becomes literal: fingerprints in watercolour, pouring down like a meteoric shower on a deserted landscape [p. 160].
Coincidences may be assigned relevance and are included in the picture:
a splatter of paint or a smudge, a spot where the ball of the drawing hand has somewhat rubbed out the chalk. What strikes one, however, is the purposiveness of his style of drawing. Using minimal means, he wishes to show what occupies him, express the feeling underlying each sheet. Each drawing, he says, is an attempt to find out how far he can go - and then attempt to do it with less. Thus, a splendid oeuvre has been created, in which, with equal measures of caution and consistency, an individual language is developed to give shape to feelings and ideas that cannot be put into words.
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Ronald Noorman, four etchings for Sur Place, a 'livre de peintre',
with poetry by Hans Faverey. Ergo Pers 2006