Mind to Hand: Drawings from the Farnsworth

The exhibition encompasses an array of drawings from the collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum—works collected from 1944 through 2003. The earliest works are a John Trumbull pencil portrait of his wife (1803), and Jonathan Fisher’s 1794 A Plan for a Schoolhouse, drawn at Harvard where he was a mathematics and divinity student before settling in Blue Hill, Maine. More recent works include drawings by Leonard Baskin, Neil Welliver, Isabel Bishop, Kate Nelligan and William Zorach, among others. Drawings in a range of media and tools prompted by direct observation of nature, intellectual constructions, and purely abstract mark-making hint at the tenuous connection between mind and hand. Each drawing is a record of a way of seeing, often pared to essentials that suggest much more than what is seen.