“Four in Maine: Drawings,” the third annual exhibition featuring the work of living artists in the region, focuses on drawing at the Farnsworth Art Museum, is on view in the Crosman Gallery through September 1.
Part of a statewide collaboration among 20 arts organizations this year, the Farnsworth exhibition includes drawings by Mary Barnes, Emily Brown, John Moore and T. Allen Lawson.
According to Farnsworth Chief Curator Michael Komanecky, the show demonstrates the wide variety of approaches to drawing present not just in Maine, but in the broader perspective of contemporary art in America.
Although the images of Sedgwick-based artist Mary Barnes’s works generally derive from her observations of the natural world, both her utilization of that imagery and her innovative techniques push the very definition of drawing. She employs a variety of materials, including ink, Mylar and sometimes collage elements in her mixed media drawings to create “different sounds in a composition.
Similarly, Emily Brown, who lives in Philadelphia and summers in South Montville, draws and paints in and about the inland Maine landscape she loves. She has recently combined some of her drawings and prints with small collected objects in a series of collages. The intuitive assemblage of the motley parts has resulted in works of both personal connection and logic.
John Moore, formerly a professor of art at the University of Pennsylvania and a resident of Belfast, has recently developed a body of large-scale charcoal drawings of old factories and other evidence of urban decay. More traditional in subject matter and materials, they are nonetheless evocative works that depend for their impact on manipulation of texture, light and mood, enhanced by their large size.
T. Allen Lawson, a Wyoming native who lives in Rockport, is primarily a landscape painter and draftsman whose carefully observed and elegantly rendered compositions immediately refer in an illusionistic way to the natural world around him. Nonetheless, the spare use of line and shading, in combination with a meticulous technique, charge these otherwise realistic works with an abstract power.
Conceived in 2009 as a means of focusing critical and public attention on the vital presence of living artists, “Four in Maine” continues the Farnsworth Art Museum’s long tradition, harkening back to the opening of the museum in 1948, of showcasing the work of living artists in the state.
The Farnsworth Art Museum is at 16 Museum Street in Rockland. For information, www.farnsworthmuseum.org or 207-596-6457.
