Juried by Thomas Germano
The call for work: Drawing in any medium, including but not limited to: graphite, pen, charcoal, ink wash, pastel, chalk, conte, colored pencils, and digital media. All subjects, styles and genres were encouraged. Juror Note: Juror’s Note:

I was pleased to see so many good drawings submitted for Hand Drawn. The drawings included a variety of mediums, styles and approaches using both traditional and non-traditional materials. There were drawings using pen and ink, ink wash, charcoal, graphite pencil, conte, collage, colored pencils, pastels and even digital mediums. I was very impressed by the skills of all the artists’ work, though not all could fit into the present gallery show. Each of the submissions showed the artist’s unique aesthetic sensibility. Some works were representational, others abstract and others non-objective. There were artists at all levels of their careers.

The Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini highly prized drawings and once said “artists’ drawings were often better than their finished works.”

Like Bernini, I enjoy witnessing the process, the search, the germination of an idea, the play and the struggle, all of which can be found in a good drawing. There is an immediacy to a drawing. Sometimes a drawing is a preliminary study for a more involved design to follow. In many instances, drawings represent a stand-alone finished work of art. Where Bernini saw the drawing as the start of an idea, we have come to understand drawing can also serve as the total culmination of a design from idea to execution to completion.

In a way that few other mediums can achieve, drawing can express the unfiltered emotion of the artist as well as provide the viewer with better insight into the artist’s creative process. Drawing possesses the work’s impact and force that artists struggle to preserve in the final medium be it painting, sculpture, architecture, design, or other.

I admired the inventiveness and variety of techniques with the content equally fascinating and engaging. The artists derived their inspiration from many sources and life experiences.

History appears as a recurring theme in these selections as a source of inspiration. Whether the subject is the studio nude, portrait, still life, landscape or cityscape, the art exists and was created within a trajectory of history. All of the traditional methods and mediums have a history while even the works that introduce a contemporary subject can be associated with social realism and the human condition. The most technologically based work, a digital motion graphic piece, relates back historically to the earliest origins of animation coupled with traditional drawing documented through digital technology.

Lastly, the human subject appeared most frequently in the works. While these works were created before our current collective global pandemic crisis, many were selected by the artists and submitted during our present national quarantine. This possibly may have had an effect on the particular works submitted by the artists. Some of the judge’s decisions may have been influenced by the selections, as there is the redemptive power of art in an age of global anxiety.

Thomas Germano March 28, 2020