This drawing relates to the artist's painting 'Roma, The Fountain', exhibited at John Moores Liverpool exhibition in 1987, which looks back to the classical Italian tradition. Conté softens the sweeping pencil lines of the spectators gathered, perhaps in celebration, around Rome’s Baroque fountain, its fantastical architectural details suggested by the rounded shapes and delicate detail to the right. The artist has commented on the practice of drawing: ‘Drawing today presents an expanded field, assailing us by its economy (as signs do), alert to an intimacy of touch, caress, disclosure, its unintended accidents of line and tone enlarging both sensory and spiritual horizons. An enduring language comprising a bold syntax of marks, quips, barbs and arrows (40,000 years in use), it retains the power to affect, instil, transform and wrest meaning from chaos'.