I think it says a lot about the dearth of traditional expectations surrounding contemporary artists that an installation of drawing made for my graduate show announcement drew surprised exclamations of, “You can draw!” from my own committee members. Drawing, the ability to inscribe an idea as image, delineate a scene or render lines as visual poetry, barely seems to register anymore in the glitzy milieu of electronic entertainment, techno-installation and the re-invigorization of plastic painting filling the art world.

Yet drawing is a basic tool for the working artist. Often confused with technique, it is at its best, a direct route to capturing an artist’s thinking. That point was made with subtle grace at the El Camino College exhibition Shades of Gray. Without trying to be definitive, curator Susanna Meiers has let the varied drawings of four artists indicate the different and challenging kind of thinking about nature that artists can reach for with their drawings….

The five rivers compounded into Anne Scheid’s running fifty-two-foot charcoal-on-wall drawing Bodies of Water uses the strength of energetic line and massive scale like a visual battering ram. Here is nature as an overwhelming visual force in the tradition of Bierstadt but rendered in the immediacy and physicality of raw charcoal line scrawled on a wall. Drawing the landscape with brute shifts of location and style, Scheid’s drawing renders a different view of nature than the bucolic panoramas typical of many landscape works. However, interrupting this rumination on power are three problematic vertical, graphite on acetate shroud drawings. Their shadowy impressions of ghostly bodies can’t withstand the drawing’s vigor, only serving to oddly frame and isolate the water’s images.

Suvan Geer