‘Desire Lines’ Explores Drawing With Six Diverse Artists

Lots of people are scared of drawing. It’s something most of us do as kids without question, but somehow it becomes daunting as we age. Many adults readily proclaim themselves “bad at drawing,” even if they doodle through their workday; they dismiss the activity rather than finding their own way forward with it.

That discrepancy prompted Sarah Freeman and Mara Williams to ask the rather fundamental question: “Why do we draw?” In “Desire Lines,” on view through February 9 at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, the cocurators bring together six regional artists with disparate styles who share an appreciation of the medium’s physicality, process and meaning.

James Siena‘s arresting works seem like doodles pushed to their natural conclusions. In “Spoolstrata,” a 22-by-31-inch graphite drawing, he creates the kind of outlined, roping squiggles — think spaghetti — that you might find in the margins of meeting notes or a middle school math notebook. The lines loop and cross over each other in a loose weave. The repetition and density of forms create a coherent composition, folded and draping when you step back, mesmerizingly detailed up close.

Siena carries a similar technique into “Atoptichord,” a 75-by-60-inch painting in Pepto-Bismol pink and electric blue. Here, blue lines snake across the canvas, slight variations in thickness reminiscent of ballpoint pen; Siena outlines those lines with more lines, creating a thrumming mass.

The show’s curators have made audio clips from each artist available via QR codes from the exhibition labels — a smart choice that is particularly helpful in personalizing a show in which much of the work is abstract or process-driven. In one clip, Siena describes how, when he tried to draw a tree as a 12-year-old, he thought he needed to picture every leaf. That visual impulse is a through line for his work.

“Allelomorphs, Amended,” a second 75-by-60-inch painting, presents a pair of forms that spill down the canvas, each containing contrasting black-and-white or brown-and-beige blocky patterns. The eye easily gets overwhelmed trying to read them. Throughout Siena’s work, there’s a tension between the repetitive, patient way he makes a drawing and the all-at-once visual cacophony of looking at the finished piece.

By contrast, Dana Piazza‘s drawings clearly convey his meditative process. In “Lines” 144, 146 and 166, each 41 by 29.5 inches, he uses a colored marker to create a gestural line across the paper. Then he makes another next to it, and another, eventually composing a blocky shape. The overlap where each mark meets its neighbor creates variation; the ink is darker where he slows his hand to create a curve. Each shape’s edges are stark and deliberate — each line gets heavier and darker as it approaches the edge, lending a three-dimensional quality to the larger shape.

Piazza talked about the clarity of knowing where the edge needs to be while he’s making the drawing — how the shape needs to end, how the lines fit together. “What I like about this approach is, it makes those decisions so crystal clear and objective,” he said. “This certainty — when I’m outside the process, it’s not there.”

Where Piazza’s drawings subtly whisper, Tara Geer‘s scream. Both of her large-scale works in charcoal, chalk, pastel and pencil on paper roil with energy and physicality. The curators describe Geer’s style as “muscular,” and it’s an apt term; in the 48-by-65-inch “Lumpy Island,” you can almost feel the strength and motion not just of the artist’s hand, but also of her whole arm. The abstract image looks bodily, too — bulbous organic forms meet directional, slashing marks that seem fibrous and taut. Dark areas emerge through repetition, like she’s underlining a curve or an edge that can’t be ignored.

That emphasis aligns with how Geer writes and speaks about the only medium she uses. “We edit for what we find important, and drawing always sort of stands back, in that less important, possibly edited-out role,” she said. “It’s sort of in the shadow of a painting, in the shadow of a finished building — all those things are rooted in a drawing, start with a drawing, are structured by drawings, and yet the drawing is discarded.”

Geer finds commonality between drawing and other ignored or marginalized objects and subjects. She brings them to the forefront in her wall-size six-panel work “Protest.” Dark and light areas of repeated marks slide between abstraction and representation, some shapes resolving into fingers or hands and, seen as a whole, the palm of an upraised fist. The visceral black-and-white piece, made during the tumult of 2020, seems to nod to Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.” It’s a drawing that, above all, resists erasure.

Nandini Chirimar‘s works also address identity through memory and overlooked details, but with a delicate representational sensibility. Those of us who say we “can’t draw” may wish we could wield a pencil the way she does. “My Mother’s Closet,” a 36-by-50-inch pencil drawing on Japanese kozo paper, lightly delineates the closet’s edges while investing all of its attention on patterned saris folded over hangers, the closet’s bar sagging under their weight. Chirimar meticulously records their patterns and textures, so much so that the silk seems floaty with a bit of a sheen. The scene, with dozens of hangers and folds, could be a still-life student’s worst nightmare, yet Chirimar’s affection and tenderness for her subject is beautifully apparent.

Smaller works depict individual textiles and accessories with equal reverence, using razor-thin lines to convey threads in the fabric. Hints of color come from watercolor or raw pigment and 23-karat gold ink; those augment, but don’t overshadow, Chirimar’s detailed observations in graphite.

Maggie Nowinski‘s bold, graphic black-and-white drawings also revel in patterns, though hers are imagined rather than observed. In a few wall-based panels, she pictures stylized leaves and rocks, forms that could equally be coral or mushrooms, twisted skeins of yarn or gnarled roots. The work’s strength comes from dynamic contrasts between patterns and well-deployed white space, which get a little lost as her forms move out of her panels and into sculpture.

“Seeking Topography (Memorial Cairns)” combines cutout, abstract depictions of rocks, glued flat to a pedestal’s faces, with three-dimensional versions of the same thing. Her “wHoles” — ringlike, ruffly structures installed to climb two different archways in the gallery — are positioned as some of the most dramatic works in the show yet fall a little flat. Though they draw the eye, the sculptures aren’t as varied or as confident as the artist’s more illustrative works.

Perhaps the most unexpected approach to drawing in the show comes from Alex Callender, whose work examines histories of race, gender and capitalism. Her installation “history constructs the house that sometimes holds us” combines a set of framed drawings, in white on black paper, with a background of wallpaper patterned with images from her body of work. A second piece next to it, “sightlines, development, windowsill, statecraft, this ground is still laced with waters and the way we could tell the story of modernism is a history of organizing and resistance to it,” uses photographs, drawings and news clippings presented as a giant accordion book with cutouts to look through.

Both projects investigate the history of racialized real estate development and resistance to it. They don’t as much tell a story as point us toward one, inviting us into a space where this history is visible. It’s drawing in the form of drawing out, drawing attention, drawing your own conclusions.

Addressing the question of what drawing is, Siena related it to a different meaning — pulling or extracting, as you would draw water or draw blood. He described it as “pulling an idea out of our head and onto paper.”

Updated January 10: An earlier version of this story misspelled the title of a James Siena painting. It is “Atoptichord.”

This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2025.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!