This exhibition features nearly fifty works in colored pencil by the following artists: Patricia Bender, Nancy Blum, Jacob Cartwright, Gionna Cuccolo, Mara Held, Warren Isensee, Cotter Luppi, Senem Oezdogan, Gary Petersen, Noah Post, Leslie Roberts, Jessica Rosner, Katia Santibañez, Audrey Stone, Richard Tinkler, and Geoffrey Young.
The exhibition is a continuation of Colored Pencil (2019), which explored the remarkable range of artistic expression that can be achieved with this ubiquitous, inexpensive, and portable art material. With its huge range of colors and the ability to create hard or soft lines, liquid-like translucent fields and dense and waxy opaque surfaces, the colored pencil is a favorite drawing tool for many artists. While the first iteration of the exhibition featured both representational and abstract works, here the focus is on abstraction.
Jacob Cartwright constructs a vibrant chromatic space with rectilinear blocks of gradating and contrasting color creating offset half circles, while Mara Held sets precise, feathery colored pencil forms over a looser ground of egg tempera, where they radiate outward from a spherical center. Brightly colored curvilinear shapes organized in symmetric patterns feel monumental despite their small scale in Warren Isensee’s drawings. Improvisatory and undulant lines meander and loop through Noah Post’s intensely colored compositions, forming irregular contours, while Gary Petersen’s brightly colored drawings set playful and irregular geometric shapes and curving lines in lively, rhythmic arrangements. Geoffrey Young’s kaleidoscopic compositions, evoking both game boards and Islamic tiles, are energetic in both color and form. Cotter Luppi burnishes his vividly colored surfaces to create a psychedelic and imaginative expression of sound made visible, while Nancy Blum burnishes her drawings of biomorphic imagery on black paper, which pulsate with an intensity and inner life. Gionna Cuccolo also works on black paper, creating small-scale drawings of architectonic spiritual zones. In a vortex of ellipses set against varying blues, and in a monochromatic web of vertical elements, Katia Santibañez offers a vision both micro- and macroscopic. Senem Oezdogan’s reductive forms are rendered in near monochromes of velvety blue, suggesting both figurative and architectonic shapes as they gently curve in space. Softly luminous, glowing color is employed in Audrey Stone’s symmetric and radiating compositions. With devotional intensity, Richard Tinkler follows the contours of irregularly shaped paper with finely rendered lines of varying color, culminating in a central, idiosyncratic solid. Jessica Rosner’s intimate and carefully rendered patterned drawings of undulating diamond shapes and loose web patterns contrast ruled sections with freehand duplication in translucent, soft colors. Language is the inspiration of the work of two artists in the exhibition: Leslie Roberts creates colorful abstractions of bar and wedge shapes, charting diagrammatic transformations of letter repetitions in phrases and place names. Patricia Bender randomly selects a word from the pages of an old Funk & Wagnall’s dictionary, letting it suggest abstract patterns rendered in translucent colored pencil across the printed sheet.
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