When artist John Bokor visited the Mitchell Library Reading Room during Sydney Festival a couple of years ago, he found himself more interested in the room than what he’d actually come for. A short time later, as Head of Pictures, I received a request from John for permission to draw in the Mitchell Library Reading Room.

John is devoted to drawing. For him, drawing is not about perfection or virtuosity over the medium but rather `a shared experience of the human condition.’ Precisely one of the things he enjoys about drawing is its imperfections. In the digital age we’ve become `used to a level of perfection that has in many ways corrected the inaccuracies of the human hand.’ It is these inaccuracies that are `exactly what I am looking for in drawing’, the inexactness of a very human form of expression ...