THE CANVAS-Nov/Dec 2011

By Britta Konau

Kate Beck | Kendra Ferguson | Jeff Kellar

Line is an extremely versatile device for abstract and representational artists alike. It can be executed using a large range of techniques and materials to achieve a wide variety of evocative effects, from the gestural and expressive to the cool and restrained. Abstract artists Kate Beck, Kendra Ferguson, and Jeff Kellar use line in the latter sense—yet not without passionate intensity.

KATE BECK

Line and graphite define Beck’s work. Whether she pours oil and powdered graphite on her vertically positioned paintings or draws line after parallel line with pencil on paper, aesthetic linearity defines her oeuvre. While her art is process driven, it is also deeply expressive of thought and emotion. For Beck, “Drawing is a state of being,” and although she has limited her palette severely, she maintains that “there is always room to do anything with black and white that a specific hue would do.”

For her drawings, Beck uses an architect’s straight edge and graphite pencils of varying softness. She tries to avoid structured plans when starting a new piece and instead places just three lines at proportionally pleasing intervals from which she develops the rest intuitively. During the process, the artist moves around and works on a drawing from all sides to gain other perspectives—for her, “Perspective is everything.” The repetitive movements required to draw straight lines are a meditative process, but they also mark time. The richly modulated lines resonate with one another and create force fields of energy that, depending on their density, can range from light and airy to darkly brooding.

Some of Beck’s drawings evoke a receding illusory space through a progression from darker to lighter areas, and others suggest dynamic space with bands of varying visual weight. EXO belongs to the latter category. Its dark horizontal bands of densely packed graphite lines are rich in their modulations of gray and black, which are interspersed with the white of the paper. While some of Beck’s lighter works appear barely touched, this one has assumed a dark sheen from the accumulated graphite. The drawing conjures a sense of hushed intimacy.

KENDRA FERGUSON

Ferguson’s architectural designs, wood sculptures, and drawings on paper are marked by formal clarity and restraint. All three creative mediums inform one another and are executed with precision and a minimum of means. Working slowly and deliberately, Ferguson starts each drawing with one mark that leads to the next, like notes on a sheet of music. Lines are lightly drawn with graphite or colored ink or simply incised, creating an interplay between presence and absence. In fact, one has to look quite closely at her work, and even change position in front of it, to see the complex subtleties in the designs.

Ferguson works in larger series that focus on specific configurations of straight or curved lines. Some lines enclose a space; others remain open-ended—which, metaphorically speaking, evokes the sensation of breathing in and breathing out. Formally, these compositions create uncertainty about foreground and background, surface and support. While Ferguson’s art appears to be exceedingly disciplined, it also contains small surprises—lines that extend outside of a given framework or circles that remain incomplete. “I hope these elements lighten the work and also release that expectation of perfection,” says Ferguson. The artist often speaks of quieting turbulence through simplicity, and in that sense her work has cathartic potential. Repetition of movement takes the form of litany, and both sculptures and drawings are connected to spiritual, emotional, and geographical places for the artist.

Dance Class 1 is part of the series Dance Class, which in turn is a sub-group of the Red Circle Drawings that the artist executed between 1994 and 2009. Incised straight and curved lines dance around the stillness of the central red circle. Intricate spatial tensions arise between the lines and draw in the edges of the handmade paper. Dance Class 1 is as immaterial as a thought—yet just as consequential.

JEFF KELLAR

Jeff Kellar creates paintings and sculptures that may seem simple at first glance but that are driven by complex spatial considerations. Working with a limited palette, often just one hue and white, Kellar uses lines and fields of color as his only compositional elements to suggest spatial recession into the picture plane. Whether he is using acute angles or an oddly shaped line to form the edge of a painting, Kellar creates three-dimensional ambiguities with minimal means that simultaneously entice and subvert our habits of perception and interpretation.

The surface treatments for his paintings and sculptures are essentially the same—layers of a mixture of acrylic resin, clay, and pigment that the artist sands and buffs to a smooth finish, leaving the color slightly modulated. The paintings are on thin sheets of aluminum and are typically displayed a little away from the wall to emphasize their status as objects.

This year, Kellar introduced patterns of individual short lines into his paintings that reference the densely drawn parallel lines of a 2007–2008 painting series. The top and bottom edge of Wall Drawing #20 (orange) is formed by a slice of white that attenuates toward the corners and is set off from the orange by a visible seam. The vertical lines are incised and filled with white as well. The arrangement provokes the sensation of pulsing, vibrating energy that reacts to the compression of space suggested by the two horizontal bands of white. The painting appears to either recede or project into space. “The line is about illusion,” Kellar says. “I am very interested in the way emotions are affected by specific aspects of the perception of space—monumental, cozy, long, narrow, high ceilinged, cramped.” Yet, the multitude of lines also negate the illusion of space, and his skillfully conceived and executed paintings can equally be read as flat, abstract designs.