NEW YORK—Drawings communicate the inner world of the artist perhaps more intimately than any other medium. From the spirit, heart, mind, and hand to the marks made on paper, the artist draws his or her own visual language—a language that defies words. When you see the result in person, a good drawing communicates viscerally.
“With drawings, you can really see such subtlety and sophistication in an artist’s hand, just in terms of their strokes or their hatching,” said Jordan Sokol, academic director of The Florence Academy of Art–U.S.
Usually, artists draw simply to try out new ideas, to create a preliminary study for a bigger, more serious piece of work—a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or a building. Yet, the status of drawings has been elevated to new heights of late, most recently with exhibitions of old masters such as “Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer” and “Leonardo to Matisse, Master Drawings From the Robert Lehman Collection,” both at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings From the Thaw Collection” at The Morgan Library and Museum, also in New York, or “The Encounter: Drawings From Leonardo to Rembrandt” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, to name a few.
Living artists are continuing in the vein of elevating drawings even further, in the current exhibit “On Paper: An Exhibition of Drawings” at The Florence Academy of Art–U.S. (FAA–US). The opening drew a packed crowd on April 29, coinciding with the general open house at Mana Contemporary, a conglomerate of studio and exhibition spaces, where FAA–US currently resides in Jersey City, in the New York Metropolitan area.
