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Fine lines
Drawing Cross Media at the PAC
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Drawings are a medium that’s much neglected. Not by artists, though. From Gainsborough to Picasso, many have been as interested in making them as in making paintings, and often moreso. From Cro-Magnon cave scrawls to Tintoretto’s flying pen to a Japanese sumi-e brush freezing a moment, drawings have been more than sketch preparations for depicting the real thing. They can be art boiled down to its most essential.

Drawing Cross Media: Pen, Pencil & Ink is being shown at Providence Art Club, with 22 works by 17 artists from Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts. The jurors were illustrator David Macaulay, gallery director Sara Agniel, and painter William Allen.

As you would expect, the spectrum of styles and techniques is as wide open as the subject matter, which ranges from several realistic depictions from nature to one abstract outpouring from an artist’s inner world.

That last one is a good starting point for discussing this show, because it demonstrates the imaginative far point ventured to. At first glance, Allison Kyner’s "Are We Getting Better or Worse?" pulls our attention to a benign pink mass sprouting lines and surrounded by small circles. Then we see that mysterious plumbing and wiring is attached to the object, and the medical message is loud and clear.

A similar one-two punch is provided by Lee Craven’s "Alter Ego," a realistic study of a barefoot woman looking up at us. But while the carefully balanced pose and the folds in the white pullover and black jeans would be enough of an offering, an upended armchair in an upper corner slaps a troubled overlay onto what would otherwise seem a neutral expression on her face.

That sort of controlled ambiguity invites re-viewing. That’s how Kathleen Dwyer’s "Turning Point" gets its effect, as two twisting ladders balance by leaning on each other against a briskly scribbled sky. A different sort of head-scratching is prompted by Sam Ames’s fine-line pen drawing, "Head." It teases us with our naturalistic first impression of the old man, but no one has a nose this sharp or loose flesh draping like dough atop his shoulders.

Also rewarding close attention is "Trio," by Jennifer Bend. The child-like drawing might have been plucked off a refrigerator door, you think, until you notice, say, the sad eyes of the Teddy bear drummer in the center — established simply by slanting the oval eyes. At play is the hand of someone who was a child once, but such touches as conflating an Easter chick with a chickadee tips things off.

I love those sorts of things popping up in Drawing Cross Media, such as the loosely gestural, thin-line sketch of a man working at an easel, by Allen Johnson. But "John" becomes an economical portrait, conveying a personality by the casualness of his other hand in his pocket.

Technique is given due respect and display. John Loughlin’s "Monhegan Island" conveys conventional subject matter but accomplished technique: merging sea, rocks, and pines through similar cross-hatch pattern. Chris McNamara’s dense ink drawings of black birds edge from illustration and into art by how they merge into their settings, and by the choices of those backgrounds. With his Australian raven, captured mid-caw, no photograph could evoke what he accomplishes with the simple expressionist technique of surrounding the figure with spatters.

Style itself can suggest content, as does the cartoon technique of Aaron McConnell’s "A New York Art Scene," which amplifies the irony of the birth-to-death imagery and the many mini-parodies jammed together. But I wonder whether three perfectly workmanlike illustrations by Catherine Van Lancker of men boat-building is not excessive in a show with limited wall space. Although an odder inclusion here is the straight draftsmanship of Kenneth Speiser’s two drawings of tables, stark as silhouettes and revealing nothing more.

Drawing Cross Media is being presented in conjunction with an exhibition in the club’s adjacent Deacon Taylor House, aptly home of the Pen and Pencil Club of Rhode Island. Design in Hand: The Evolution of Writing Instruments Since 1784 is sponsored by Lincoln-headquartered A.T. Cross Co. and displays more than 300 pens, from an 18th-century reservoir pen to a Fisher "Space Pen" that doesn’t require gravity for its ink to flow. History and time lines are provided as wall text, and an elaborate illustrated catalogue is available.


Issue Date: October 24 - 30, 2003
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