It Starts with a Line
Drawings by Lyle Kissak, Irene Liotis, Trace Miller, Daniel Schiavone, Kylis Winborne
November 20, 2000 - January 5, 2001
We live in a world of constantly changing images. The socialized environment is filled with the manipulated that becomes form that evolves into language and art the means for communicating emotion. And it always starts with the mark of a line. Even created by computer, pixels, zeros and ones aside, images simple and complex begin with the fundamental acts of drawing that reveal endless possibilities.
Artists use drawing to loosen up or make notes for future work. Initial impulses may unveil simplified but recognizable forms or complexities that demand editing to become fully developed concepts. There may be spontaneity and immediacy, free flowing and volumetric forms, or the efficiency of the simplest contour lines divulging the artists’ internal discourse or completed thought.
Since the Renaissance drawing has been considered an individual artistic act rather than vehicle for making preliminary studies for significant work in other media. The art educator Bernard Chaet said that "drawing from natural forms is basic to all personal explorations in art and that the assimilation into the artist's memory and complex of sensibilities of all the forms of nature, including man and his environment, provide the best support for the artist’s search in behalf of his own individual expression." If art is as various as the people who practice it, the works represented in It Starts with A Line by Lyle Kissack, Irene Liotis, Trace Miller, Daniel Schiavone and Kylis Winborne offer unique eloquent perspectives on making art.
The works by Lyle Kissack demonstrate command and decisiveness combined with ability to let go and allows himself the freedom to have the works generate. Through layers of delicately yet deliberately applied line in a pictorial space and with overlapping, tilting planes his subtle images appear. With Kissack's three books of drawings there is a temptation to disassemble and display pages as the individual works that they are but by viewing chronology we are privileged to witness evolving thought.
Trace Miller's intimate works are created with lyrical, gestrural markings and the result is at the same time subtle and direct. Are the works narrative and to be read together or is the singular imagery symbolic? The strength of each work is in its surprise, Miller entices us to look, contemplate, and come to our own conclusion.
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Kylis Winborne |
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Kylis Winborne's series of portraits are reminders of the direct power of the artist's hand. With strength and emotion in the multi-layers of line and color, Winborne captures the essence of his Veterans, these people with tremendous stories to tell. The portraits pull no punches. Winborne, a gifter painter whose "day-job" has him sitting in front of a computer creating graphic images for the media, is a prime example that no matter how much manipulation and technologically assisted art work can be created, art - Starts with a Line.
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Of his work in It Starts with a Line, Daniel Schiavone writes "...[it] function[s] within the tradition of drawing. Though they are finished works, they are also sketches. Drawing is more ephemeral than painting. Drawings consist of dust clinging vicariously to paper. They don't possess the permanence or architecture that imbues painting. These drawings are especially exciting to me because they are transitional works. They point to possibilities. They begin an idea but come to no conclusion... My hope is that the viewer will see new possibilities in these drawings - catching a glimpse of things that hover at the edges of our reality..."
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Like Schiavone, Irene Liotis is inspired by vast potential. She loves the freedom of drawing and writes, "...There is nothing quite like facing pristine paper holding a fat piece of charcoal in your hand..." The act of drawing is freeing; largely unplanned with imagination unhindered. The eraser is as much a partner in liberty as the charcoah, forming light positive markings in dark negative space or allowing a fresh change in mind or direction. Commedia dell'Arte VI, the grid of nine drawings in this exhibition, is based loosely on Italian theatre and opera's celebrating fantasy and spectacle. She "intend[s] the drawings in the bottom row to be a surprise, a bit of magic. Contained and strong in themselves, when included in the grid they bring out further movement, extension of personality and narrative."
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