#Repost @drawingcenter with @make_repost ・・・ We're reflecting on exhibitions from The Drawing Center archive as we continue to explore drawing from home. We'll be sharing staff members' favorite drawings, culled from the thousands of works on paper exhibited throughout our forty-year history. Lucia Zezza @club_bingo —The Drawing Center's Bookstore Manager and a practicing artist—shares her favorite drawing, a sandpaper ‘painting’ that exemplifies a largely overlooked drawing technique within the history of American folk art. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ —⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ “As a practitioner of drawings that often look like paintings, I was struck by this work from the 1999 Drawing Papers catalog 'Darkness like a Dream,' which holds a small and captivating selection of what are called 'sandpaper paintings’ (a double misnomer for charcoal on a gritty marble dust surface). The precious 20-page book brings this rare technique, which has been largely overlooked in the history of American folk art, to light. Produced in the thousands during the 1800s, these drawings were fairly accessible. People of all skill levels would borrow and alter subject matter from popular print media like travelogues, and used the readymade print as a loose map to experiment with light and shade, allowing the sparkle and tooth of marble dust to shine through for luminance. In ways that emerge later on with some of my favorite Modernists like Agnes Pelton, the resulting scenes are not so much illustrations of their source material as registers of mental states; in the case of Niagara Falls, an eerie, even gothic one of perhaps personal religiosity. The sandpaper paintings are, to me, otherworldly and sometimes fantastically campy examples of the human imagination.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ —⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ To read “Drawing Papers 2: Darkness Like a Dream Nineteenth-Century Sandpaper Drawings” online for free, please visit our bookstore website. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ —⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Image: Unknown, "Niagara Falls, New York," date unknown. From the Collection of Matt Mullican and Valerie Smith. (at The Drawing Center) https://www.instagram.com/p/CUXx3YuLRkf/?utm_medium=tumblr