Four in Maine: Drawing

Four in Maine, the third annual exhibition featuring the work of living artists in the region, will focus in 2011 on drawing. Part of a statewide collaboration among twenty arts organizations this year, the Farnsworth exhibition will include drawings by Mary Barnes, Emily Brown, John Moore, and T. Allen Lawson. According to Farnsworth Chief Curator Michael Komanecky, the show will demonstrate 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’ 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,” which may even include marks upon both sides of the work. Similarly, Emily Brown, who lives in Philadelphia and summers in South Montville, has merged elements of drawing, collage and found objects in a series of recently executed works. She has allowed images from magazines, product packages and other commercially made examples from popular culture to inspire another kind of innovative approach to subject and materials. 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 Colorado 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.