'Drawing'
opens doors to worlds both strange and subversive By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin |
|
||
|
D. Berman Gallery draws together some fine talent for its latest show, simply titled "Drawing." Forty-one works by 16 Texas artists fill the gallery walls. For some, drawing is their primary artistic expression. For others, drawing is a means to develop works in other media or a diversion. In the later category is Sydney Yeager, whose drawings are quieter versions of her textural, colorful abstract paintings. Ditto with Janet Kastner, whose charcoal and acrylic drawings feature fluid patterns reminiscent of her sensuous porcelain sculpture. Among those for whom drawing is a chief artistic expression is Cynthia Camlin. Her large, blue ink, almost photographically realistic drawing of a deer staring fiercely at the viewer is at once unsettling and funny. The strongest works launch from variously subversive foundations. Zoe Charlton's mixed media drawings on luminescent vellum tackle tough issues such as race and history by using a loose, fluid, figurative style to portray symbolic scenes. In ". . . Wish You Were Here, Betty and John," two white people water-ski behind an historic slave ship: how perfectly direct and pointedly irreverent. The British-born Malcolm Bucknall is just wonderfully eccentric. And a talented draftsman. His masterfully rendered sepia ink drawings look part Edwardian portrait, part fever dream. Take "The New Boy was a Strange Bird” -- an image of a boy clad in proper English tennis wear, but with a baby bird's head. And then there's "Song and Dance Routine" -- a picture of the body of a charming little bobby-socked girl with a chimp's head. Morphing animals with humans also characterizes the work of Rachel Hecker. Her three untitled pencil, ink and acrylic drawings sport tiny, finely rendered images of half-animal, half-human creatures situated smack in the center of an 11-by-7-inch piece of paper. A bird has the head of a young Paul Newman, another dog sports the visage of John Wayne. Weird. And wondrous. And how refreshing that an artist is mature enough to be weird and wondrous. Finally, Bob Anderson's two graphite drawings portray dark, complex Hieronymus Bosch-esque scenes -- "Dogma of Maybes and "Mayday Room Revisited" -- that are filled with the detritus of material life and populated by strange creatures. One shudders to think of having to navigate out of such a setting. But that’s the great turn of Anderson's work. As with Charlton, Bucknall and Hecker, enter into it and you might never leave. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|