A peek into artistic process, choices in ‘The Drawing Experiment’

Bottom line: An engaging look at the flexibility of drawing in a show that offers a window into artistic process and choices.

"Sprawl," at the High Museum, is certainly the largest, most comprehensive drawing show in Atlanta this summer. But the far smaller, more narrow in focus "The Drawing Experiment" at Chastain Arts Center Gallery — which features 12 artists to "Sprawl"s 76 — offers its own modest pleasures.

Large group shows like "Sprawl" can often feel like exercises in taste. To rein in and categorize an enormous array of work, you are often forced to make choices, about what you like and what you don't. In a show like "The Drawing Experiment," you are instead offered the luxury of plumbing the sensibility of each artist, paying attention to form and examining the way the same materials can create startlingly different results.

The dozen artists in “The Drawing Experiment” were tasked with some simple parameters: create a drawing using a dry media. Each artist was given a 6-by-6-foot space to draw directly on the gallery wall. Artists had three weeks to create their works, and a time-lapse video in the gallery gives a taste of how the space was transformed into a hub of activity as artists sketched their ideas directly onto the walls.

Rule breakers by definition, some of the artists allow their drawings to drip like a tomato thrown against a wall, onto the space below their allotted 6-by-6 square space, others use materials outside the dry media parameters and artist Joe Peragine incorporates a video playing on a monitor to complement his drawing. But the fun of such coloring-outside-the-lines boundary testing is seeing the different ways artists create within their space.

These works also attest to the ephemeral and philosophical nature of artists’ vocation; and how these investments of time and labor will soon be erased like the grains of sand in a mandala. “The Drawing Experiment” allows us to appreciate process and creation as wonderful acts in themselves.

Many of the works reward an expectation that drawing will deliver finely wrought detail and precision as with Marie Matthews’ lovely Rembrandt-esque charcoal portrait of an elderly man in wide-brimmed hat and cape, “Jimmy.” Kellie Romany’s untitled work sketches a nest or hive onto the wall with such detail, texture and presence, the object takes on an almost sculptural quality.

Other artists defy that expectation of careful renderings of the world. William Downs’ pulsating, trippy “Reveling in Bed of Thorne’s,” for instance, in which a reclining figure is rendered in double-vision multiples, looks like something viewed through a drunken haze. Yanique Norman also offers a more phantasmagoric vision in her affecting, disturbing image in both dense and delicate mark-making, focused on a woman giving birth to dozens of tortured souls with shades of Kara Walker or the movie poster art of Saul Bass.

From the silly to the profound, artists tackle all manner of content. Perpetually drawn to tales of innocence and vulnerability, longtime Atlanta artist Peragine’s cuteness overload, “Kitten and Duckling,” features a charcoal and acrylic image of the kind of soft, fuzzy creatures memorialized on junior high bedroom walls.

Several artists venture into social commentary, including Benjamin Jones, whose “21st Century Citizen” uses the Pledge of Allegiance to affirm the primacy of a government “for all.” And Jessica Scott Felder’s ghostly rendering of nine chairs posed as if for a family portrait pays homage to those who lost their lives at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.