Yesterday afternoon I attended George Butler's 'Meet the Artist' event, at the Imperial War Museum North, to find out more about his WithDraw exhibition that I recently visited and even based my summer A Level project on! I booked my tickets shortly before visiting his exhibition, with the Henshaws Art Galleries and Museums group, and you can read the blog post about my original visit to the exhibition here!
Renowned reportage illustrator and journalist George Butler visited various parts of Afghanistan, during the drawback of International troops in late 2014, and documented his time spent there - visiting different locations and meeting new people - through his illustrative pen and ink drawings that are featured in WithDraw. Pieces include portraits of soldiers and day-patients at a hospital, landscapes of schools, mosques and villages and market streets opening up for the day, including one solely dedicated to the selling of birds!
'Meet the Artist' provided the unique opportunity to find out the meaning behind his visit to Afghanistan - telling different stories to the ones we regularly see on the front of a newspaper - where George shared his personal stories and photos behind each piece and even provided an interesting insight into the experience of his drawing process, completely in-situ with large crowds gathering behind him, through personal videos.
'Meet the Artist' provided the unique opportunity to find out the meaning behind his visit to Afghanistan - telling different stories to the ones we regularly see on the front of a newspaper - where George shared his personal stories and photos behind each piece and even provided an interesting insight into the experience of his drawing process, completely in-situ with large crowds gathering behind him, through personal videos.
After George's presentation I had the chance to ask a question, regarding my A Level summer project, on how he would recreate some of his pieces if he had to use unorthodox materials. I also had to have a photo taken with him as I'm so familiar with his work now after spending the past few weeks experimenting with different materials and recreating some of his work in my sketchbook!
— George Butler (@george_butler) August 23, 2015
You can view the video that I took during during the event, with the Q&A session following afterwards, below: