Siena sketchbooks, Italy 2002

Chalk pastel/graphite/charcoal on paper

Drawings made over 3 weeks in summer 2002, walking the same route daily - from Camping Colleverde - on the edge of Siena - into the medieval city centre.

Most days were spent skulking around the urban hinterland rather than the habitual tourist haunts, with a pile of sketchbooks and an ad hoc stool fashioned from a palette crate.

Siena was gearing up for Palio season - flags of the Contrada are evident in some of the sketches.

Featured in in-between at inter/media, King Street Glasgow, 2005 with painter Jackie Anderson

Jack Mottram’s text:

Jackie Anderson paints people in places, Toby Messenger paints the places in people…

… Messenger’s work is, for the most part, unpopulated, but he tackles landscape at a tangent, matching Anderson’s slippery approach to portraiture. In works made on daily walks in Siena, always along the same route, Messenger is looking from the corner of his eye, turning his attention to the forms and spaces others might miss - he sees the curve of a roundabout, or the gap in a fence, ignoring grand architecture, blind to sweeping vistas. These are drawings of the spaces that enter memory, but are never remembered; the spaces, perhaps, that reveal more about a place than we realise.‘