Her drawings have taken Wendy MacNaughton to Guantánamo, truck stops and artisans’ workshops – and with her art making show DrawTogether, which she launched at the start of the pandemic, to tens of thousands of family homes worldwide, doing pencil dances, taking a closer look at the world and drawing away fear.
Your career is all about drawing. Yet you started as a copywriter. How did that happen? Wendy MacNaughton: There was a time when I didn’t really draw very much. And it started ironically in art school. When I went there in the late 1990s, there was a focus on conceptual art, and I became very interested in creating terrible performances (laughs). But it was also in art school that I became interested in advertising, because I thought of it as the most powerful art form around. Very few people go to a museum, compared to the amount of people who drive by a Los Angeles billboard. So I went into advertising thinking that that would be a place where I could create engaging work. You laugh because we are no longer 22 years old and know how the world works. But that’s how I ended up getting a job as a copywriter.
