‘L.A.’ Gives Draftsmanship Its Due

Drawing, like painting, is occasionally pronounced obsolete by those who imagine art can be made out of thin air. Those who don’t regard the announcement as akin to saying sex is dead. They just look puzzled and go on merrily doing it.

Evidence is currently embodied in “Drawn From L.A.,” an exhibition of contemporary draftsmanship simultaneously on view at Art Center College of Design and the Pasadena Armory for the Arts. Including more than 40 local artists, it was organized by the institutions’ gallery directors, Stephen Nowlin of Art Center and Jay Belloli of the Pasadena Armory, along with respected independent curator Josine Ianco-Starrels.

The team did a remarkable job, concocting an ensemble that makes important subtextual points without appearing preachy. With ecumenical embrace, they included artists of virtually every stamp. There are superstar conceptualists like Mike Kelley and reclusive visionaries like Marvin Harden, abstract artists hip to installations like Arleen Chicami and theoreticians who invent private languages like Joyce Lightbody, figurative artists who like to bring the old masters up to date like Vincent Robbins and thinkers like Jerald Brainin who believe a modern purist like Mondrian still has juice.

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In short, the show makes the point that every kind of artist who can, still draws. That’s more than merely aesthetically significant. World culture seems to be unraveling and along with it certain standards once considered crucial. One of these was competence. In the arts the measure of doing a good job is expressive clarity, mastery, if you like, of a certain instrument. No one has a problem with the proposition that musicians ought to be able to play their piccolo or dancers control their bodies.

The visual arts, however, got into a muddle in recent years. Emphasis on ideas of pure creativity tended to discount the need for a coherent channel of communication to carry the creator’s message. Nobody says it has to be drawing, but has to be something. A performance artist is still an artist if he or she has or can acquire the theatrical skills necessary to hold an audience.

Drawing, I think, got into bad odor because of an association with dreary, rote stuff taught by stodgy academics and became, thus, an impediment to free expression. The evidence of this exhibition is that drawing facilitates expression. The show is like some great jazz orchestra in which each player is a star in his or her own right.

Ira Korman’s “Sometimes I Remember” depicts an ordinary middle-aged guy in a jacket and open-collared shirt. The work could scarcely be more academic, but its minute detailing bespeaks the hours of attentive, knowledgeable work lavished on it by the artist. Because he cared so much and so tangibly for his art and his subject, Korman ennobles all three. It’s like Bach on a string quartet.

Karen Carson, by contrast, clearly had a lot of fun drawing a conceptual cartoon of a lady whose shopping is suddenly interrupted by “The Attack of the Killer Me’s.” Sometimes drawing is sonorous, sometimes flutey. The show says nothing is beyond its expressive reach.

James Murray brings the eyes of a 19th century visionary to bear on apocalyptic L.A. landscapes and it feels just right. Benjamin Weissman’s “15 Heads and Cars” looks like an animation storyboard. Megan Williams’ “Rocket Man” makes suave 1930s-style Esquire cartoons live again. Such works remind us of the art form’s virtually universal commercial application. These days you can do really drop-dead drawings on computer, witness some work in the nearby student display space.

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But you don’t need a computer or a team of animators or printing presses. All you need is paper, pencil and ability. (Sorry, you have to have ability.) Thus, drawing becomes a bastion of individuality, another standard currently besieged.

The exhibition is also, inevitably about L.A., a town founded on private dreams leading to distinctive personalities. Every work here is basically done the same way, but no work here is likely to be confounded with any other. Jim Shaw’s dream-based cartoon conceptualism is related to Kelley’s and yet deliciously different. Kent Twitchell invites comparison to Korman but delivers a different sort of heroism. Steve Galloway probably thinks about Hieronymous Bosch’s haunted fantasies but there’s no mixing them up.

In the end, “Drawn From L.A.” is a curiously uplifting and reassuring exhibition that tells us some things don’t go extinct even after 10 millennia and drawing is one of them. It’s a particular pity there’s no catalog. So many artists here we don’t see enough of--Peter Liashkov, D.J. Hall, James Dooline. . . .

* Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, through June 22, closed Mondays, (818) 396-2244; Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, through June 2, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (818) 792-5101.