Drawing on the Edge of Faith

installation photo from the
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution website
“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,”
at http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/drawing/

Recently, I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see a show called Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge. Like many titles in the arts, this one is filled with intentional ambiguity. Each of the six artists whose works are featured—Mequitta Ahuja, Mary Borgman, Adam Chapman, Ben Durham, Till Freiwald, and Rob Matthew —push drawing into new territory, exploring the edges where drawing meets photography, painting, collage, writing, video, and digital imaging.

Some of the drawings are very large, expanding faces until they stretch nearly from ceiling to floor, filling the visual field even when the viewer stands on the other side of the smallish rooms in which these works are installed. Others are tiny, depicting their subjects within circles only a few inches in diameter. But whether large or small, all of the works in this show invite close inspection, revealing their most interesting moments at the edges where visual description meets the unmarked surface, where clothing folds against skin, where one color or tone fades into another.

Many of the drawings are edgy in other ways, as well. Ben Durham’s exquisitely rendered portraits, composed of words written by hand on thick, soft, handmade paper, begin as mug shots from the Lexington, KY police blotter. I found myself repeatedly moving in close, where I could study the edges where the lush, deeply textured surface of the paper gives way to the illusion of smooth, radiant skin, trying to understand just how the artist managed such an improbable balancing act. The nearly-photographic crispness of the image became even more improbable when I realized that every stroke of graphite contributed not only to the visual likeness, but also to letters, words, and sentences that together recount the artist’s memories of everything he can remember or has been told about the subject.

installation photo from the
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution website
“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,”
at http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/drawing/

Mary Borgman’s huge charcoal drawings on Mylar similarly drew me in, inviting me to see the traces of her hand and mind in the gradations of dark and light that, from a greater distance, resolved themselves into old, soft denim; intricately braided dreadlocks; or luminous, bare skin. The people in Borgman’s full-length portraits look calmly out at the viewer with so much physical presence that they seemed almost ready to engage me in conversation. Larger than life, these extraordinary portraits of rather ordinary-looking men transform their subjects as they emerge mysteriously from smudges, rubbings, and erasures that flow as if the charcoal had somehow become a liquid rather than a gritty powder in the artist’s hand.

For me, however, the most surprising edge was in portraits that were, in many ways, the most traditional. Rob Matthews presents at least twenty austere, highly detailed, depictions of his friends and family in simple graphite on paper, all carefully circumscribed to fit into identical, perfect circles. In one, the artist’s wife holds a crocheted skull; in another, his father holds a seashell; in a third, his sister-in-law holds a candle. The titles give each subject’s name and relationship to the artist, as well as some explanation of the object that serves as that person’s attribute, a marker of his or her self-understanding. In these the tour-de-force drawings, the sitter’s personality is captured in a sagging shoulder, a stray wisp of hair, or a barely-lifted eyebrow, all of which become, on closer inspection, no more than subtle gradations from deep black to an almost invisible gray built up in cross-hatching almost too small for the naked eye to perceive.

What was most edgy about Matthews’ work, however, was not the drawings themselves, but the quite casual, and completely unapologetic, references to sincere Christian faith. One portrait is identified on the title card as “my pastor”; another, describing the image of his friend and fellow artist, Mikel, says “Mikel holds a lily that traditionally symbolizes purity”; a third informs us that his sister-in-law “wanted to hold a candle for Matthew 5:15”. Others are more oblique or even entirely secular: his father holds that seashell “because the ocean is where he goes to block out the rest of the world and connect with God”; Amy holds a Mason Jar as “a symbol of multiple meanings”; Rebecca holds a cat whose “posture suggests how much she did NOT want to be drawn.” [to see photographs of these images, go to http://npg.si.edu/exhibit/drawing/matthews.html]

Not so very long ago, any artist who aspired to recognition in a serious, high art venue would have carefully disguised any shadow of conventional Christianity under a cover of historical or ethnic interest. As recently as 2004, noted art historian James Elkins upset a lot of committed, serious artists who also happened to be serious, committed Christians by telling a story about an art jury that refused a work they had previously accepted on learning that it had been painted by a nun. At that time, Elkins was simply describing a point of view that was widely shared among members of the visual art establishment when he observed,

Committed, engaged, ambitious, informed art does not mix with dedicated, serious, thoughtful, heartfelt religion. Whenever the two meet, one wrecks the other. Modern spirituality and contemporary art are rum companions: either the art is loose and unambitious, or the religion is one-dimensional and unpersuasive. [On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, p. 115]

Now, just a few years later, that once hard line between art and faith seems to have, if not dissolved, at least become less well-defined. It has become an edge, a place where one thing may imperceptibly shade into something else, changing our perceptions of both. The drawings of Rob Matthews are neither loose nor unambitious. Nor is the religion to which he alludes one-dimensional and unpersuasive. Rather, it is a simple fact of life for him and his family and friends, as solidly rooted in their daily life as the skulls, candles, and seashells that connect them to death and eternal life.