Drawing seldom gets its due — in museums, galleries, books or even the internet — always relegated to a lesser status then other media.
To be fair, this is partially because drawings and other works on paper are more subject to light damage and generally cannot be on permanent display; but largely it’s just that they are considered less impressive then colorful paintings.
Drawings, however, have their own visual charms, quite unlike those of paintings; though they often reveal them in more subtle ways, perhaps requiring a little more contemplation on the part of the viewer.
Arcadia Fine Arts, a gallery in Soho that has been a long standing bulwark of representational art amid the waves of modernist “isms” that routinely flood the art scene in New York, has mounted a themed group show of drawings — drawn, if you will, largely from their roster of highly regarded representational artists but also including some names new to the gallery.
Drawing the Line opens today and runs to November 1, 2012. There is a color catalog available.
(Please note that after the exhibition closes, the link I’ve provided will simply be to the gallery’s current show at that time.)
On Arcadia’s website, the drawings are shown in their frames; I’ve taken the liberty here of cropping in on them to show them larger in a limited space, at times altering the composition by cropping away shadows from the frames.
(Images above: Richard Morris, Kerry Brooks, Michael Chapman, Danny Galieote, Dorian Vallejo, Michael Klein, Julio Reyes, Ron Hicks, Jeremy Lipking)
