Larry Morelli
Courtesy of the artist
Larry Morelli, Untitled, 2001, ink on paper
Drawing is everything. But artists never do enough of it, and audiences rarely seek it out. It seems too much of the past for current practice, an achingly tedious exercise yielding neither flash nor frenzy. Admittedly, the discipline demanded of looking at a drawing is nearly as great as that demanded of making one, but there is no other visual art that so requires – and rewards – the observer’s engagement. Painting is about what is there; drawing is about what is not. By definition incomplete and provisional, the best drawings are pure suggestions to the eye which insist that we collaborate. We revisit our own readings of the world through them. Choose one of Ellsworth Kelly’s evocations of flowers in line (the Yale Art Gallery has a supreme example), and try not to be stunned by the gift it gives you of your own ability to see.
Courtesy of the artist
Larry Morelli, Tom Nevers Road, Nantucket, 1997, marker on paper
This quality is absolutely clear in Larry Morelli’s drawing, particularly those of roadways, narrow and wide. Although a number of them are related to his heavily worked highway paintings with their dark energy, they are not studies for them in the strict sense. Rather, they distill the paths on those landscape into what we recognize as signatures of civilization with all its determination and freedom and dismay.
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