Evolver 146

23 At the intersection of science and mathematics Tim Edgar makes drawings that subvert the precision of those disciplines, or at least that is what he has been doing since 2019. Before that his practice was photography. He is utterly passionate about drawing and although he has no regrets about his career path he does feel he is playing catch up. Trying to grab hold of all those years when he wasn’t drawing. The photography came about because, as a student, he was seduced by the alchemy of the photographic process. Those magical moments in the darkroom when a ghostly image starts to emerge on a blank piece of photographic paper as it fl oats in a tray of chemicals. We’ve all been there! Super fi cially his drawings seem very measured. It’s easy to make the assumption that they appear to owe much to that search for perfection that happens when working with a photographic image. But they are not striving for that type of perfection, and he constantly disrupts the square the line and the circle. His photography has provided him, however, with a gift for composition, which is an essential element of his new way of working. Edgar’s drawings rely heavily on an initial grid and that is where the mathematics comes in. He starts, almost always with a square format on which he draws a very faint ruled pencil grid. Hour after hour of painstaking markmaking follows. He rotates the paper at regular intervals, “trying to get overall evenness, symmetry and harmony so nothing is dominant, always trying to balance out circles and lines”. As he works, tiny squares start to emerge, each one hosting a diagonal line of bright colour submerged in a wash of very pale watercolour. When the paint dries it leaves a slightly uneven edge all around it which subtly bleeds into the square next to it. These edges, irregular lines, which disrupt the perfection of the grid are exquisite. Each drawing feeds off the one before, a journey towards something new, and as he progresses the feeling of disruption seems to increase. On a recent trip to London he bought a box of wooden stamps, the sort that children love – triangles, squares, hexagons, octagons, rectangles. They really are irresistible and Tim has been using them on his latest drawings, dipping them in thinned watercolour and stamping geometrical shapes at random before going back in with his customary colour pencils. The randomness of the stamped marks disrupts “the ready-made grid so it is losing its shape and structure and becoming shattered”. The tools he uses are graphite pencils and water-soluble coloured pencils, which achieve richer and richer hues with each layer, and feel almost good enough to eat. The addition of embossing moves the drawings towards three dimensions so they start to have a sense of existing as artifacts or objects. He is extremely particular about the papers he uses, rarely using sketchbooks for studies, preferring the surface of high end smooth Hot-press paper for his fi nished work. Music is signi fi cant in providing the work with a time-based element. The mutability of time as it stretches and contracts as he immerses himself in the process of drawing. He listens to jazz whilst drawing, and has recently been commissioned to make an artwork for a new album cover for a prominent UK saxophonist. “I like to think that my work echoes the patterns, rhythms, structures and tonal variations of jazz in some way.” Tim sees his work as “based around science and the cosmos, planetary systems and the contrast between the macro and the micro”. He equates his circles with moons and suns, which interlock and impact on each other. He is deeply affected by the fragile nature of systems, a fragility that he aims to communicate through the imperfect nature of his drawings. Fiona Robinson Tim Edgar ‘CIRCLE SHATTERED GRID’ (Watercolour and graphite, 2025) Tim Edgar won the ‘Evolver Magazine Feature Prize’ at the RWA 172nd Annual Open. His drawings can be seen in the exhibition, see listing on page 15. Portrait photograph by Conrad Tracy