Distinctively Drawn

Championed by David Hockney, the striking blue steel drawing studio at Arts University Bournemouth has made waves with its brilliant maverick design, as Jeremy Miles discovers.

- Jeremy Miles

AS THE world celebrates the genius of David Hockney in his 80th year it is interesting to note that, more than 50 years after he first shook the art world with his radical approach to painting, his work remains a major inspiration to young art students in Dorset.

For Hockney, who has a major retrospective of his work at Tate Britain, is an artist who has challenged and explored the practice of picture-making throughout his long career. Over the years he has worked in paint, print, photography and video but there have always been two constants - a need to examine the practice of seeing and understanding, and his exemplary draughtsman.

The influence of this is tangible in the design and ethos of the exciting new drawing studio on the campus of Arts University Bournemouth, which has picked up several awards already including the RIBA National Award 2016 and it is in the Royal Academy of Arts Top 10 Maverick Buildings 2016.

Designed by a direct Hockney contemporary, the esteemed international architect Sir Peter Cook of CRAB Studio, the drawing studio is a gorgeous building with sensuous curves and awash with light from different aspects.

Astonishingly this striking blue steel building - manufactured in a former German U-Boat factory - is the first custom-built drawing studio to open on the site of a British art school for more than a 100 years. Arts University Bournemouth principal and vice chancellor Professor Stuart Bartholomew, who commissioned the project, explains: “During the post war period and particular in the sixties a lot of drawing studios were decommissioned while many art schools were merged with other institutions.

“This project is about re-establishing what arts schools are about. What we did was to exemplify this in the curvature of the building.