What we think about when we think about drawing

“A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” — Paul Klee

When we think about drawing, it may first evoke simple sketches in a pad or notebook, an idea, a brainstorm, a note to be elaborated upon in the not-too-distant future. But drawing is also a form unto itself. It is not just a precursor but a process. Drawing is an expression of form upon a plane. It is the creation of structure, composition, and concept. 

What drawing can be: four responses at the Menil Drawing Institute invited four artists to consider the boundaries of material and concept in the practice, its connection to other art forms and the artists’ own practices. Of his own practice, William Blake once said, “Let a man who has made a drawing go on and on and he will produce a picture or painting but if he chooses to leave off before he has spoiled it he will do a better thing.” In this exhibition, Constantin Luser, Tony Lewis, Jillian Conrad, and Teresita Fernández showcase the continuing evolution of the practice in contemporary art, how expansion does not have to spoil a work. 

Installation view of Constantin Luser’s Garden for Shadows and Vibrations.

Photo by Lauren Marek

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors first encounter Garden for Shadows and Vibrations, an installation of kinetic drawings by Luser. A light drone fills the space, a whir of tiny motors commingling with the muffled sounds of the installation to the right. Filigree sculptures are suspended in the air, rotating at different speeds and casting shadows across the walls. Each sculpture is a delicate tracery, a quick sketch lifted from the page. As they swivel, they force a change in perspective, a new angle, a slow morphing revolution throwing shapes onto in situ sketches applied directly to the wall. Here, drawing is not static but performed. Its outlines shift constantly, tethered to neither wall nor plane but flickering across multiple surfaces, multiplied in silhouette.

Moving into the next room, drawing transitions from grace to messier sketches, a storm of makeshift reflections in graphite. In Charlatan Slightly Muffled, Lewis approaches drawing as an investigation of style and process. The forms fight for attention, pulling the eyes between a massive rendering of a cartoonish face in screws and graphite-soaked string and a pool of glittery graphite, quicksand absorbing a vitrine stuffed with vast paper crumpled into a ball, a muffled voice emanating from somewhere within. The slightly muffled charlatan in question is conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr, who famously debated James Baldwin in 1965 on the topic of “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?” The work revisits Buckley’s debate with Baldwin, not to reanimate the argument but to reframe the violence of its structure. Lewis draws not to explain, but to expose: the residue of language, the texture of power.

Installation view of Tony Lewis’s Charlatan Slightly Muffled.

Photo by Lauren Marek

Jillian Conrad takes a quieter approach. Rooted in this idea of expression, of capturing meaning to communicate, she carries the concept to both literal interpretation and metaphysical exploration. Her work lingers at the intersection of communication and longing. Conrad molds this desire in a malleable alloy in Letter, reconstructing the line “I would gladly spend the night writing to you” — penned by a French woman to her husband while he’s at sea — in its original french and English and hanging it on a net like kelp caught in its lining. The gallery feels at first sparse, each work a delicate addition to the space, a tender rendition of our desire to connect, make marks, to yearn for meaning so deeply as to craft constellations in the sky. A metal line runs from a stone on the ground rising to meet the wall. Glass orbs rest on the ground and hang from thin wires at varying heights. Cetus is a constellation wrought from the sky, her rendition of one of the oldest forms of line-making in our brief existence as a species. Conrad's work reminds us that drawing begins not with the hand, but with desire: the need to reach, to trace, to signify.

Installation view of Jillian Conrad’s Cetus in the foreground and Fork against the wall.

Photo by Lauren Marek

The final gallery of the exhibition is a confrontation. Scorched Earth(Lament) is the culmination of the show’s slow escalation from gesture to ground. Charcoal dominates the space in thick, sweeping gestures that read like strata, like smoke, like ruin. The installation evokes both landscape and topographical map, a charcoal rendition of the planet’s strata rising from the inner core to the surface and into the sky through plumes of smoke. In her use of charcoal, a material itself created through destroying part of a landscape, Fernández mines the landscape as a means of communicating the violent destruction of both peoples and place — scorched earth, the devastating military tactic meant to leave no chance of growth, and lament, the poetic expression of grief and mourning. Her work mourns not only the land but the lives scorched from it, and the knowledge extinguished in the process.

Installation view of Teresita Fernández’s Scorched Earth(Lament).

Photo by Lauren Marek

Together, these four installations don’t redefine drawing so much as loosen its borders. They suggest that drawing is less about line than intention, about how we process, relate, and reckon with the world around us. From wire to graphite to smoke, each artist probes drawing’s capacity to hold memory, confrontation, longing, and mourning. The exhibition doesn’t seek to resolve what drawing is but instead lingers on what it can do, how it can vibrate, distort, carry, connect.

A perhaps more apt quote from Klee: “Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see. Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.” Each of these installations expands the vision of not just the medium but the social and emotional terrain it treads upon. Drawing, in the right hands, is not a form to be perfected. It is a mode of inquiry, of traversing uncertainty. Yes, drawing is a line going for a walk, but along the way it traces the remnants of erasure, binds us together, and marks resistance. 

What drawing can be: four responses is on view at the Menil Drawing Institute (1412 W. Main St.) through August 10.