Of course you can draw a picture with a pencil, or a pen, pastels, charcoal, or even a crayon, as every kid learns early. But what about drawing with metal wire or vinyl tape, laser-cut wood, wax, thread, computer cords or sand? It all works, and often engagingly, as three exhibits running concurrently at the Arvada Center galleries prove again and again.
Taken in together — and they should be, before they close on Aug. 27 — the exhibits go a long way toward expanding how we think about the act of drawing, an art practice that goes back to the earliest humans, and which gets a refreshing update by the center’s curators.
Like everything produced at the Arvada Center, the exhibits –“The Big Draw,” “Drawn from the Source” and a solo show by local artist Ramón Bonilla — are sprawling. The center has 10,000 square feet of gallery space and regularly produces jumbo-sized spectacles that can fill it.
These shows have a whopping 79 artists between them, all from Colorado, who contribute a variety of viewpoints and media. Many are familiar names to regional art fans, like Tony Ortega, Mindy Bray, Irene Delka McCray, Mark Brasuell, Margaret Kasahara and Patrick Marold.
The work is, by and large, accessible, much more so than most current gallery and museum shows that tend to be centered around edgy work that not everybody gets. I do not want to say this show is all about pretty pictures, but there are a lot of easy-to-like pieces on the walls, landscapes, portraits and domestic scenes that read in a straightforward way.
If you are grumpy about the complexities of contemporary art, these shows offer a nice way to chill out on a hot summer day. They are low-tech, save for a couple of video projectors, and traditionalists will like them. But they will also impress folks who like their art challenging, mostly because the technical skills on display here are astonishing, ranging from highly-detailed ink drawings to carefully pressed prints, to deft work in encaustic, to scenes captured under harsh circumstance in nature.
The largest of the shows, “The Big Draw” is powered by a few notable showstoppers. Arvada artist Bala Thiagarajan contributes a “Kalam Floor Drawing,” using a folk art technique from her native India. The piece is made of rice powder, which is arranged on the gallery floor in a mesmerizing pattern of overlapping lines and dots. Thiagarajan explains in a short audio recording (which visitors can easily access via mobile devices using a QR code) that the art form goes back centuries but is still practiced as a ritual “by millions of Tamil women around the world everyday.”
Denver artist Trine Bumiller uses the show to present the entirety of her expansive “Close Encounters” series, which covers an entire wall of the center’s main gallery. The piece consists of thousands of small drawings, on multiple colors of paper, that Bumiller made on-site at the famous Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. The work transforms an intimidating, larger-than-life geological icon into a place of intimate self-reflection.
Veteran artist Charles Livingston gets the largest space in the room, resurrecting his 2005 “Body Motion Drawings,” an installation that stretches a whopping 60 feet along the floor. The conceptual work is physically overwhelming, and it is daunting to consider how he made it — using a pencil to draw hundreds of thousands of back-and-forth lines on an endless roll of tracing paper. It unravels as a remarkably human work of art as viewers get up close and see the determination required to make it.
There are other pieces worth noting, including from Josh Davy, Holly Nordeck, Brady Smith, Travis Vermilye, Drew Austin, Bryan Leister and Kevin Baer.
But “The Big Draw” is truly special because it is a group effort and because the decision-makers kept an open mind on what to include. It is hard to take the simplest of art forms and present it in a rich and complex way and “The Big Draw,” through sheer volume and range, achieves that.
“Drawn from the Source” is a smaller show on Arvada Center’s upper floor, featuring seven artists who each offer multiple works. The idea behind the exhibit is that these artists make particularly keen links between the “interconnected beauty of the objects, environments and relationships around us,” as the exhibition text explains.
There is not such a clean divide between what these folks make and what the artists in the “The Big Draw” on display downstairs make, but the work is technically top-notch and full of drama.
Andrew Beckham contributes four charcoal drawings of natural objects, like rocks and trees, from his 2020 series “Harbinger: Stories from a Burning Planet.” The pieces, in almost photorealistic detail (he is a photographer mainly), illustrate the lasting beauty of the environment despite the assault of climate change. They are romantic, in a way.
Anna Kaye, a star of the regional drawing scene, contributes new and surprising works from this year that capture the curves and angles of candles and melting wax. As a special effect, she uses projectors, mounted on the ceiling, to add a layer of colorful, flickering flames to her her
monochromatic charcoal pieces.
The final exhibition in the trio is Bonilla’s solo, which is titled “the boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places for me.” The show is built around a large-scale centerpiece: a drawing Bonilla has made by attaching rice paper tape and vinyl directly on the gallery wall.
It spans a considerable 50 feet or more, with lines of black tape, of various widths, zigging and zagging and intersecting, creating geometric, interior spaces that he fills in with multiple colors of the vinyl.
It’s a captivating and monumental work that manages to reference lush landscape painting and, at the same time, strict architectural drawings. The piece is the last stop on the tour of these three, expansive shows, but for many it will be the highlight.
All three exhibitions complement each other nicely. So do the audio offerings that accompany each piece and I highly recommend taking advantage of them. Audio recordings can sometimes feel stilted and condescending, but these minute-long snippets use only the voices of the artists themselves, explaining their works. They are a lovely touch to a set of shows assembled with considerable care.
IF YOU GO
The Arvada Center’s summer shows continue through Aug. 27. They are free. Location: 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada. Info: 720-898-7200 or arvadacenter.org.
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