Anne
Scheid: “Excerpts From”, “Shades Of Gray”
at El Camino College
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I think it says
a lot about the dearth of traditional expectations
surrounding contemporary artists that an installation
of drawing made for my graduate show announcement
drew surprised exclamations of, “You can draw!”
from my own committee members. Drawing, the ability
to inscribe an idea as image, delineate a scene or
render lines as visual poetry, barely seems to register
anymore in the glitzy milieu of electronic entertainment,
techno-installation and the re-invigorization of plastic
painting filling the art world.
Yet drawing is a basic tool for the working artist.
Often confused with technique, it is at its best,
a direct route to capturing an artist’s thinking.
That point was made with subtle grace at the El Camino
College exhibition Shades of Gray. Without trying
to be definitive, curator Susanna Meiers has let the
varied drawings of four artists indicate the different
and challenging kind of thinking about nature that
artists can reach for with their drawings….
The five rivers compounded into Anne Scheid’s
running fifty-two-foot charcoal-on-wall drawing Bodies
of Water uses the strength of energetic line and massive
scale like a visual battering ram. Here is nature
as an overwhelming visual force in the tradition of
Bierstadt but rendered in the immediacy and physicality
of raw charcoal line scrawled on a wall. Drawing the
landscape with brute shifts of location and style,
Scheid’s drawing renders a different view of
nature than the bucolic panoramas typical of many
landscape works. However, interrupting this rumination
on power are three problematic vertical, graphite
on acetate shroud drawings. Their shadowy impressions
of ghostly bodies can’t withstand the drawing’s
vigor, only serving to oddly frame and isolate the
water’s images.
Suvan Geer
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Artweek
By Suvan Geer
“Shades Of Gray” at El Camino College
September 2001
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