Drawings list

This page shows my own work, and I include it not because it represents the right way to make work, but because a tutoring program promoting authenticity should at least try to lead by example. The tutoring offered by AP tries to focus on a student’s ability to create work that reflects their core interests. In this sense, for me, authenticity is related to productivity as long as it’s nurtured carefully. With AP, ideally, those interests connect to broader architectural themes.

Sebastian Fathi

Authentic work is neither mystical nor difficult to make. It comes from an understanding of key personal interests, and in this sense it is the easiest kind of work to produce. It develops naturally and pays little attention to fashion or trends.

While the architectural profession rightly demands social, environmental, political, and economic responsibility, my work centres on one primary theme: the relationship between drawing and space. I have always drawn, and I have always been interested in space. This kind of work is particularly relevant to architectural education – students work within these more fundamental aspects of the field.

AP is an inevitable outcome of my core interests, and architecture school applications are a useful excuse to tutor students to make high-quality, personally motivated work.

Some students at AP benefit from hearing their tutors talk through their work to get a sense of what their tutor values and how those values may relate to their own progress. Please let me know if you’d like to talk through anything on this page.  

Full drawings gallery here.

I. Two Axes

Drawing can be understood in terms of two axes. The first runs between representational and non-representational work. Representational drawing depicts something that either exists in the world or has yet to exist in it. At the other end of that axis sits non-representational work. For example, if a sheet is covered in graphite and left on a desk, does it exist in the world in its own right, without depicting or representing anything else? Yes it does. This can be tough to hear in the age of highly representational media (Instagram).

Drawings can become objects when they operate non-representationally. Scale makes this concrete. An A2 sheet in space does something different from an A1 sheet. The scale and graphite determine the space that forms around the work. Any object acquires this: a constructed zone, simply by existing in physical space. A person standing in a room does not represent anything; they exist in their own terms, and they alter the space around them entirely. They have, in Donald Judd’s terms, their own objecthood. This is what makes Judd such a necessary reference point. He made what he called specific objects, three-dimensional artworks, each with a specific relationship to the space they embed within. Translating that relationship into a verbal language* does it a disservice. That relationship requires a direct encounter; explanations wouldn’t be appropriate. They can be explained in terms of art history, but that’s very different to the work itself.

*To elaborate on language for a moment: I find that the relationship between, say, a book and the moral world is the same as the one between a drawing and the physical world. Same hierarchy, different language. Drawings can’t do the intangible like books can, and books can’t do the tangible like drawings can. But both the tangible and the intangible are rich. And both are meaningful. But making tangible work that tries to explain intangible things, like morality, politics, philosophy, could be a mistake. Better write a book instead. Unfortunately, nowadays we see a lot of visual work like this simply because it’s easy for galleries and organisations to circulate (summing up a painting in a paragraph, as it relates to intangible ideas, is an easy sell. Especially if the painting is primarily being viewed online, where its physicality crumbles away into a mere symbol).

The second axis runs between the observational and the propositional. At one end is observational drawing: a sitter in front of you, recorded through the act of looking. At the other end is propositional drawing: a plan of a proposed building, a set of instructions for a contractor to realise a space. These are genuinely different activities. One goes from A to B, the other from B to A.

Arguably, any drawing sits somewhere on this graph, and like a graph, the magnitude of one axis does not negate the magnitude of the other. Points can be plotted all over the graph and move around freely.

II. Drawing People

I don’t draw people to get a likeness. That’s why I like Frank Auerbach’s paintings – they are an effort in translating cities and people from 3D to 2D. His best paintings are the ones that struggle the most to get this right. They’re a little uncomfortable. Yes, he might have made some paintings of E.O.W. that are more of a likeness than others, and that may have been important on some occasions, but they don’t have any illustrational qualities to them at all. They’re directly about painting and translation, not about E.O.W.

For me, the figure is mainly useful as a way of organising space on the sheet. Bodies are spatial in specific ways: the direction of a gaze orients the space around it, and hands folded in a lap compress things inward. An eye socket reads as deeper than it really is. A head is a dense object. You notice all of this while drawing.

Graphite is translucent, so marks build up while the sheet still shows through underneath. The sheet is always at risk of losing its brightness with slightly too much graphite, and that tension is productive, especially for body subjects. Bodies in physical space have an equally complex type of embedment in the space they occupy. They have complex physical depths, and graphite can bring that tension out in its translucency. The paper is as much the medium as the graphite. (The worst drawings are purely holders of graphite). Each drawing starts at the bridge of the nose and works outward, as if the head had been pressed against a flatbed scanner, with more detail at the front and a softening toward the edges.

III. Drawing Land

There’s a difference between drawing land and drawing landscapes. Landscape drawing usually tries to depict a specific place with some fidelity to how it looks. That isn’t the aim here. The aim is in what land is as a space: its depth, its vertical and horizontal relationships, the differences between one feature and another. A place is a starting point rather than a subject to reproduce. If I ever feel like I’m colouring in a depicted landscape scene, I’ll fold the drawing up and throw it out. (Colouring in a predetermined image – waste of time?)

Geography, sight lines, rises, dips, boundaries, etc., get reconstituted on the sheet through graphite and erasure rather than being transcribed from observation. The marks end up being more of a physical landscape than a picture of one. Even the tools used to make a drawing are included in this; the hard edge of a ruler is a physical artefact of occupied land (occupied space). Tracing along its edge is as much a drawing concerned with land as optically tracing the edge of a tree or building. And that’s the problem – drawing land is hard because it doesn’t exist directly in my studio. But rulers, edges, sheets, pencils, surfaces, etc do. They’re a landscape too. Or they’re part of one. I wouldn’t want to try to draw something that’s not immediately in my space. If this were the pre-photographic era, maybe I would.

If I really wanted to document a beech tree I’d probably take photos on my phone, collect some leaves, record some dimensions. And to experience it, maybe I’d just make a note in my phone to come back to said beech tree at a certain time of day and just look at the thing (this is why I don’t share too many photos of my built work). But a beech tree offers a tall kind of space, and that can be used as a starting point for a drawing.

Most of my landscape drawings fail. The land itself is almost always more interesting than anything I can do on paper. There’s still a felt obligation to keep making them, on the basis that the occasional accident justifies the effort. When a drawing does work, it’s because the spatial qualities of the land (a boundary, embedded form, cylindrical mass) have come through on their own terms rather than as a depiction of them.

IV. Drawing Architecture

Architectural practice generates two distinct categories of drawing. The first is instrumental: plans, sections, elevations, construction documents, produced for planning departments, contractors, and consultants. These drawings are made in service of other people and other ends. They are, in a meaningful sense, not drawings at all; they are instructions. Those drawings are not shown here (they’re held in the servers of planning departments, clients, consultants, etc.).

The second category is drawing in the fuller sense: work that falls out of a project, that orbits it without being strictly accountable to it, and that exists in its own right, architecturally, once drawn. Graphite architecture. Drawings that take an architectural project’s idea and play with it outside of the communications of the project. Brancusi’s birds?

To go beyond those two categories, it’s possible to make drawings that are architectural in nature but don’t speak to a wider architectural project other than the space the drawing sits within. For instance, two A2 sheets with two small marks forming two small corners suggest an enclosed space within and around the sheets, extending the enclosure into the space of the room. Basic vectors like left, right, up and down become more revealed. Is it possible to just draw left? Can left be more left than another type of left? The drawing edits the space of the room, so it’s architectural. Simple enough.

I became frustrated with making beautiful computer drawings that either go nowhere or can’t actually be seen once the computer is switched off. They die in the computer that produces them, pure data, leaving no physical trace.

The UK is a very difficult place to make architecture. Many architectural projects remain as general ideas, and I got bored making these invisible computer drawings that don’t become useful. This issue is not just limited to the UK. Year after year, there are more reasons for architecture projects not to go ahead. The big reasons? Money, politics, and regulations. All are becoming tighter and tighter. The big instigator? The information age (1940s+). The internet’s data is causing an endless tide of deterministic compliance, and the value of architecture is becoming harder to understand. Regulations for the improvement of building safety, or environmental improvement, are a good thing. But in the slog, I chose to make standalone graphite drawings instead. (This paragraph was written in March 2026).

A current architectural project of mine in Cornwall (2026) explores how a thin architectural slab can embed into the earth and the landscape. Like an extra crust of ground, forming the geology of the site and open to the sky above it. This spatial condition, the compression of ground against the vastness overhead, is difficult to draw. Conventional architectural drawing separates its three axes by ninety degrees, allowing for quantitative communication of direction and form. Design software like Rhino exists on the basis of these axes, and using Rhino for years has altered the way I understand space. Rhino space is endless and stark (I recently saw the A24 film Backrooms – Rhino space is similar to that). In a series of drawings made in response to the Cornwall project, those axes are separated by just two degrees. Verticals, horizontals, and depth collapse together into a single dense field. The effect is closer to what happens when looking at the horizon of the sea: the further the eye travels, the harder it becomes to distinguish the axes from one another. They soften into a continuous space, much as the proposal itself is intended to merge with its ground.

I sometimes draw the same drawing multiple times and present them as a single series. One drawing alone is usually read as a representational drawing. Meaning, a single drawing tends to offer a depicted scene within the rectangle. Maybe this is because we’ve all learnt how to read single drawings (image in a frame depicts a space elsewhere, and we come to the image with that assumption), or maybe this is a fundamental perceptual trait of vision. Either way, there is an artifice to single drawings. An artifice can easily be gimmicky. A bad painting, for example, usually doesn’t have an awareness of its type of artifice, rendering it a gimmick.

Two drawings are often read as a diptych. This word less interesting to me than what two identical objects offer when viewed together. Two identical objects can be read as stereoscopic, and the idea of ‘spot the difference’ invites the uncanny. Three drawings, a triptych, can be read as religiously inclined. Again, I find that less interesting than the basic fact of three identical objects next to each other. Three objects clarify a series, and in doing so, a series can be projected into the space the series sits within. Three objects hint at a kind of infinite space. Four objects begin the realisation of that infinite space, and together they appear as a single large object of many parts. These kinds of notions can support the intention of a drawing. They can make drawings more or less representational, or more or less propositional.

V. Embedment

The sculptor Charles Ray has spoken at length about the concept of embedment with frenetic gesticulation. In his lectures, his hands go back and forth as he tries to get various nuanced points across that science would struggle to support. He describes how the apples in Cézanne’s paintings cannot be extracted or plucked from the painting. That the apples are totally embedded in the canvas. He’s not necessarily talking about the fact that the paint has set. He’s talking about physical belonging, and the painterly conditions which allow belonging. Apples can be painted in such a way as to tether them to their scenes, and their canvas. Ray extends this idea further, suggesting that if humankind has no soul (yikes), it is gravity that embeds us in the earth. That gravity is the force that fixes things in their place, not just physically but in terms of belonging.

I find the world richer knowing that it is only as it is found. Meaning that gravity is persistent and present, and that its physical rules can be more meaningful than storied forms of spirituality. I’m not interested in stories or plots. I find the technical much richer than the storied – it holds more. The world being as it is found is an important topic for drawing, which deals with ideas of embedment, representation, propositions, and observations. It’s a direct and present way of relating to our space. My drawings are titled B, L and ARC for this reason. B means body, L means land, and ARC means architecture. Surely this is all we have? Ourselves, what we find, and what we make.

In drawing, embedment works on several levels. There is the first object: the medium itself, the graphite and the paper. There is the second object: what the drawing attempts to depict or propose, whether real or imagined. And there is the third object: the drawing that results from the encounter between the two, which is not reducible to either. This third object is the drawing as a thing in the world. Less instructional – it exists in its own right.

Graphite responds to light. A drawing on a wall looks different throughout the day: the greys darken in the evening, the highlights come forward at midday. Colour appears in the carbon. Behind glass, this becomes more pronounced. All these drawings are intended to be framed (metal frames) for this reason. The reflectivity of graphite works with the reflectivity of the frame. In this sense they’re less a record of something and more of an embedment in the local space. And to go back to the levels involved here: for representational drawings like landscapes, the subject is embedded in its space (imagine historic Cornish hedgerows sunken into the landscape), the graphite is embedded in the sheet tracing those hedgerows, and the drawing is embedded in the room it ends up in.

None of these ideas are graspable here, as these drawings have been converted to instructions for screen pixels. RGB, 1s and 0s.