ELECTRIC DRAMA: RESIDUAL AND EMERGENT MODERNISM IN WILLIAM DOBELL’S TELEVISION DRAWINGS

William Dobell considered drawing fundamental to his practice, working in a studio littered with drawings and leaving numerous, crowded sketchbooks as part of his legacy. Dobell's many quickly-drawn street sketches lie within the Baudelairean tradition, they are observations of modern life, distant echoes of Constantin Guys. But in the late 1950s, Dobell adopted a new form of observation and a new tool; he made drawings in ballpoint pen from television broadcasts. In the first sustained engagement by an Australian artist with the televisual arena, Dobell reinvented Baudelairean spectatorship by attending to the distinctive flow of both the ballpoint pen and the television image. In doing so, this traditionalist found himself redefining key terms within drawingobservation, attention, touch, motifaccording to the demands of new consumer technologies that would soon become ubiquitous. Dobell's television sketches and doodles show him modelling the fate of the artist's gaze in late modernism.