For most of her career, Andrea Way has created astonishingly complex, breathtakingly beautiful drawings. But in 2007, she simplified her methods and made one small drawing per day for an entire year. On view through Nov. 28 at Adkins Arboretum, The 365 Calendar Drawings present an intimate look at this artist’s unusual drawing technique.
The Arboretum gallery is exhibiting eight of the twelve months’ worth of drawings and will host a reception on Sat., Oct. 11 from 3 to 5 p.m. to meet the artist and learn about her process of working.
A bicoastal artist who divides her time between Washington, D.C., and a small coastal town near San Francisco, Way is a veteran of many solo and museum shows throughout the U.S. Her work is included in the collections of the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and was the subject of a major retrospective at the American University Museum in 2013.
In keeping with her fascination with the natural sciences, Way began more than 30 years ago to develop a highly original method of drawing that mimics the processes of nature. Resembling anything from star maps to plant cells seen under a microscope, her artworks are exquisitely intricate images that evolve according to sets of interrelated rules.
Beginning with an initial layer of marks made by chance, perhaps splashes of washy color, a loosely spiraling line or leaf prints, she elaborates on the shapes and colors, introducing layer after layer of spidery lines, hatch marks, dots or tiny brushstrokes related through a code to the initial image and to one another.
“It’s fascinating to me how a few basic shapes in nature can be combined in infinite ways,” she said in a conversation with critic David Tannous that forms the text of the catalogue that accompanied her retrospective.
Way normally works for a month or more on each of her extremely labor-intensive drawings, but shortly before Christmas 2006, she sustained a concussion requiring several days of bed rest. It was New Year’s Day before she could resume work; however, it was clear that she wouldn’t be physically able to maintain her usual intensely exacting discipline. Instead, she decided to create small drawings, each completed in a single day.
Like all of Way’s works, each of The 365 Calendar Drawings is based on a dialogue between chance and order, but owing to the constraint of completing one drawing per day, they are freer and more casual than her larger drawings. Each month has its own theme. February’s drawings are based on the branching structure of a leaf or tree. August’s started with random dribbles of blue and turquoise that call to mind Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. In November, Way made leaf prints surrounded by intense shades of shimmering metallic color.
For each drawing, there’s a particular code or set of rules. Drips of color might be outlined in green then peacock blue with a pinstripe of white, while the areas around a leaf print might be filled with a mosaic of countless crisscrossing lines or with tiny spirals drawn with an ultra-fine drafting pen. Bright blue dots might mark the intersections within a web of dead-straight lines stretching across a spiral like a network of laser beams.
It’s fascinating to puzzle out how these small drawings evolved. The more you look, the more you see as you gradually realize you’re looking at a metaphor for how all of life is interconnected through both time and space.
“The patterns that I create refer to the patterning in nature,” Way said. “What I am trying to capture is how things work and then to make work the way life is made.”
This show is part of Adkins Arboretum’s ongoing exhibition series of work on natural themes by regional artists. It is on view through Nov. 28 at the Arboretum Visitor’s Center located at 12610 Eveland Road near Tuckahoe State Park in Ridgely. Contact the Arboretum at 410-634-2847, ext. 0 or [email protected] for gallery hours.
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