David and Liza Dimbleby on Drawing the Unspeakable at Towner Eastbourne

Alongside his illustrious broadcasting career David Dimbleby has for the past ten years chaired the trust that runs the Towner Eastbourne gallery. Now 85, he’s stepping aside this year. To mark the event, Towner’s Director and Chief Executive Joe Hill invited David and his daughter Liza, an artist and writer, to curate a valedictory exhibition. Brian Childs caught up with them as they put the finishing touches to  Drawing the Unspeakable, a show that germinated from the seed of their Covid experience.

ROSA Magazine:  You’ve called this  Drawing the Unspeakable  and there’s some very dark matter here – but it’s also strangely uplifting. How did it come about?

David: The idea came from Joe. I was standing down, and he knew Liza and I used to exchange drawings, and that she’s a proper artist, and he had this idea, why not jointly do an exhibition of things you like? The original idea was for just one small room…

Liza: And then seven months later, or nine months later…

David: It just grew and grew and grew.

Liza: Yes, and I think we couldn’t ignore, we didn’t want to just do nice landscapes in Sussex or something, because when we met, Dad and I, in December to talk about what the show would be about, we were in the middle of these wars. I did a Russian degree in Moscow for a year in 1989-90, just when the Berlin Wall was coming down, so I got bound up personally, I’ve got lots of friends there. And then I think Dad’s brother dying at that point [the sculptor Nicholas Dimbleby died of motor neurone disease in February], we felt beleaguered both personally and in the world. We felt we needed to make something, do a show about what drawing can do in relation to this.

But it’s also about the language of drawing, which takes an idea and shows you something, surprises you. You don’t start with an idea and do a drawing of that, because then you could write it down. It’s about when you start a drawing and you’re surprised by something you didn’t foresee happening. So the drawing is speaking to you as much as you are speaking, through the drawing, to each other.

David: We had a thrilling three months. We began our research with just a few ideas and then we went to galleries, studio visits, looked at all kinds of things, and in our minds it just grew and grew, horror, fear, love, childbirth, all sorts of things.

Liza: Some of our best times really, just looking at art. Dad’s good. My uncle Nicholas always said dad’s the artist, not him. He’s a good drawer, too.

ROSA: Have you worked with him before?

Liza: No (laughs). Well, I did a couple of weeks on the Richmond and Twickenham Times when I was 16 in the summer holiday and he taught me, with Malcolm Richards who was the editor there, an excellent editor actually, he taught me how to write shorter sentences and how to condense articles and things like that. It was really nice, I enjoyed doing the local reporting and going round to the Beekeepers’ Association and so forth. But that wasn’t working with him obviously, it was working for his paper.

ROSA: How did you break away from all that?

Liza: From journalism? I got to university and I thought, there’s only so much you can say in journalistic language. Growing up in a family in which all the debate goes on in this political conversation… and then I went to Russia and I fell in with a whole gang of artists who were more well-read in English literature than anyone I ever knew and it was just thrilling, this sense you could be serious in other ways. I sat around the table and they weren’t ignoring politics but everyone was talking about art and literature and I was, like, oh. And that’s when I started drawing, just went into a studio and drew and painted. I went back and finished my Russian degree and from then on I was always doing both.

ROSA: Do you still?

Liza: I still do, I did interpreting for refugees in Glasgow. it’s a good way to pay the way for being an artist. I still do bits of interpreting and now I teach drawing, so I often talk about Chagall and I’ve written essays about Chagall’s etching and Vitebsk and the things that overlap…

ROSA: I want to ask about Towner, because there’ve been reports that it’s financially in a delicate position.

David: Well, you know, all art galleries but particularly the regional galleries, are going through difficult times. Eastbourne [Borough Council] found it couldn’t make ends meet and so it cut back on various things and one of the things it’s cutting back on is its grant to Towner. The Council actually owns the building, we run it for them. But what matters is the running costs. I’m not pessimistic about it. You just have to find original ways to keep the thing going, and we have. We have a very good restaurant here that people come to, we have a very good cinema, you keep the place alive and if you have to cut back a bit, well, so be it – we get grants from people, people very sweetly give us donations, members help. So I think, it’s not: “Oh my God we have lost a bit of money from the council, we’re going to have to close.” It’s: “We’ve lost a bit of money from the council, how do we work round it, what do we do now?” Because these galleries, Hastings, Bexhill, here, Brighton to a certain extent, Pallant House, we’re all actually feeding a need for the arts.

ROSA: Could you work more closely together to create a sort of critical mass, to draw more outside visitors down to this area? Coordinating shows across the south coast galleries?

David: Maybe. My instinct is, it’s the individualities that are important. We do different kinds of things. Hastings Contemporary does one kind of thing, Pallant House another, Charleston Lewes is doing another. I think, actually, the variety is the attraction. In terms of bringing people, yes, and we’ll have this scheme running, I hope, by next summer, where we’ll have a bus running along the coast to all four galleries. I think that does make sense. But when it comes to coordinating, the danger would be that it’d lead to a kind of uniformity. Actually, each gallery is maverick, that’s the point of it, each gallery has a director and team which says, I know what we’ll do. Like this exhibition: nobody in their right minds would have put on this exhibition if we were part of a coordinated effort with, say, Pallant House: “An exhibition by David Dimbleby and Liza Dimbleby? You must be joking.” And yet we’ve created this wonderful exhibition…

Liza: We’ve pulled it off!

ROSA: Yes, but there’s a still life exhibition at Hastings which kind of reverberates with a still life exhibition at Pallant House, and when I talked with people in Hastings they said they were to some extent coordinating to try to create a common interest in the tradition. And here you have works which resonate with stuff that’s being shown at Charleston Lewes at the moment, so, why not draw people’s attention to the fact that if they go down to the south coast they can get a lot?

Liza: Definitely, they can get a lot – in fact they’d need an overnight stay! I think among artists they’re very aware of it, it’s just that other people in London, they need to know there’s just as good a quality now here as there, if not better. Because its smaller galleries here and they have more flexibility and can be more imaginative. That’s definitely a thing I’ve learned now.

ROSA: One more question. There’s a wall in this show of your own drawings. One’s a lovely picture called Family Tree.

Liza (laughing): My dad wanted that one.

ROSA: It’s a crawling figure with a tree trunk strapped on its back… How important is it in your work to be a Dimbleby, with that weight of family tradition, for good or for bad…?

David (laughing): She’s escaped it entirely.

ROSA: She has, but you haven’t…

Liza: Well I live in Glasgow and no-one actually notices there. That’s when I knew I could live in Glasgow, I went to take my bike in and they said “Oh What’s the name? Timperly? How do you spell that? T-I- M… ?” and I thought, ok, fine, no-one knows, this is good, this is nice…

David: She’s been 20 years at the Royal Drawing School and living in Glasgow. Me, I’ve done what I wanted to do. I started out when I was very young. It wasn’t as if I had any kind of an expectation or burden – I chose what I wanted to do all the way along, and I’ve loved it.

ROSA: Never been in a situation where you went to a possible employer and they said, “Oh, you’re a Dimbleby…?”

Liza: No.

David: No, because I’ve always been a freelance. I never belonged to the BBC. I’ve never been on the staff, I don’t have a pension from the BBC. I just do what producers want me to do. Producers come and say ‘we’d like you to do this’, and I do it. Or I don’t do it. I turn down things. I know what I like. That’s why I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve been completely free.

Drawing the Unspeakable, curated by David Dimbleby & Liza Dimbleby, is on at Towner Eastbourne until April 27, 2025. Tickets £4.50 – £9, free for members. Pay What You Can tickets available on the first Friday of every month.