The Drawing Show

at the Boston Center for the Arts

through November 7

The word "drawing" often brings to mind traditional pen-and-ink creations of Leonardo DaVinci's sketchbooks. In the 90s, however, the term has been largely redefined. This new look at what "drawing" really means is one of the strengths of the Boston Center for the Arts' fall exhibition "The Drawing Show."

The exhibit is a juried show featuring the work of 42 artists from Boston as well as other parts of New England. Painter Natalie Alper, sculptor Ah John Keys and the BCA's Exhibitions Manager Carole Anne Meehan curated the show; their combined vision and expertise makes for a show that is colorful and intimate as well as quite extensive in its scope.

The show includes over 65 works; several artists contributed more than one work. The pieces range from more traditional drawings, like Kate Sullivan's cityscape "View from Post Office," to sculpture, like Bradley J. Rubenstein's "Drawing Device #3"--a motorized plastic gadget that "walks" on four pencil "legs," leaving lines and shapes in its path.

Portraiture thematically links many of the pieces together despite the wide range of styles. Bruce Kamanski's "Portrait of Mary Novak" is a photo-realistic piece: the artist used a photograph instead of a model as inspiration to create a work that is so precise that it is indistinguishable from a photo.

Conversely, Phillip Schwartz's "Job's Curse" is a near-life-size work featuring a gaunt, sketched figure whose outline is filled with a grim monologue that begins "God damn the day I was born and the night that forced me from the womb." Susan Avishal looks at portraiture in a completely different way. Trained as an illustrator, she draws detailed close-ups of the clothing that people wear; she describes her work as "a metaphor for any covering which can both hide and reveal what is underneath."

In addition to portraiture, architectural sketches are another major subdivision of the genre of drawing. Featured in this exhibition are two works by Preston Scott Cohen, an artist who earned his master's degree at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and is now an assistant professor of architecture there. His drawings, with titles like "Third Sterotomic Object Intersecting Previous Two on a Near Horizontal Axis" can appear somewhat daunting to a layman but can still be appreciated for their intricate, precise lines and complex forms.

While sculpture may seem out of place in a show about drawing, the few three-dimensional pieces in the exhibition are quite well integrated with the rest of the works. Scott Davis's "America Has a Lot of Holes" is a sheet of white paper on which the outline of the flag is made of pinpricks. The work, which is reminiscent of some of the paintings of Jasper Johns, is a drawing in the eyes of the artist.

Davis asserts in his artist's statement (each artist provided the gallery a personal explanation of the methods and inspiration for their works): "A landscape, a series of free-form lines, or even a tiny hole in a piece of paper can all be equally definable as drawings--they're all `drawn' from the mind of ideas." His statement seems to embody the sentiment of the jury that chose the works for the show; this broad definition of drawing makes for a vital and unique collection of art.