When we first began to acquire drawings, we found it natural to look closer to home, to the artists whose works we were showing at the gallery, whom we knew and liked, who were available to answer questions when we had the courage to ask them. So we turned to Claude Garache, Joanet Artigas, Gerard Titus-Carmel, Jim Bird, Manel Lledos, Wayne Taylor and others, talked to them about why they did drawings, when they knew they had succeeded, and why they thought they fell short when they were not totally happy with the results. The experience of watching Jim Bird edit himself by looking at a mixed media piece, pointing to an area with which he was not satisfied, talking about how he might fix it, and then tearing it into strips because he thought it would be better to start over will never fade from our minds. We also remember Joanet Artigas telling us about his working habits. He draws everywhere he goes on small pocket-size pads. Every night he selects a few drawings from the day's harvest and works on them on roughly 13"x20"sheets; every few weeks, he looks at these drawings and works some of them up on 30"x42" sheets. Gradually, then, he selects and refines, and then uses the drawings either as a basis for prints, paintings, or sculptures, or saves them to exhibit as finished works (or gives them away as gifts to friends!). From this small group of artists, we have since branched out. Some artists tend to make lots of drawings (Jonna Rae Brinkman and John Himmelfarb come to mind) both to learn from and to sell; others seem to make very few (or perhaps over the years it is just that very few have survived: the number of Titian drawings is quite small, while enough Durer drawings survive that Abaris published a 6-volume catalogue raisonne of them about thirty years ago). Collecting drawings is very much a matter of luck: ordinarily, they only come up once, unlike, say, a print in an edition of 100 where you have 100 chances to get one initially and then over time repeat opportunities as a dealers and collectors offer them for sale. We buy the best of what we can find when we happen to have money to afford them. Sometimes drawings are abundant but money is not, sometimes (very rarely), the situation is reversed; more often, both are scarce!

In this show we are also featuring works by earlier twentieth-century artists like Albert Besnard, Nataliya Goncharova (a beautiful and early abstract composition done in Russia c. 1913; one of her paintings sold at Sotheby's London in 1996 for Please call or email for current pricing information), the sculptor Reuben Nakian, Rudolf Schlichter, the German Expressionist master (and friend of George Grosz), Marcel Vertes, Isabel Bishop, Aaron Bohrod, Joan Root, Phyllis McGibbon, Warrington Colescott's drawing for The Last Printmaker in his History of Printmaking Series, outsider-artist Simon Sparrow, and many others. We are also featuring a large group of drawings ranging from the late 15th century to the 19th by that famous artist, Anonymous (his/her name is legion!). Our new acquisitions complement the drawings we already had by such modern and contemporary artists as Pierre Alechinsky, Joan Gardy Artigas, Jim Bird, Claude Garache, John Himmelfarb, Manel Lledos, the COBRA artist Lucebert, and Gerard Titus-Carmel, all of whose works will also be in the show. We include a monoprint by Joan Miro whose chief compositional element is a very elaborate signature. We are also showing a brand new group of pastels by Jonna Rae Brinkman.