CURRENT EXHIBITION

The late, great, often cantankerous art critic Robert Hughes more than once bemoaned the apparent decline in standards for draftsmanship. “In the 45 years that I’ve been writing criticism there has been a tragic depreciation in the traditional skills of painting and drawing, the nuts and bolts of the profession,” he told members of London’s Royal Academy of Art in 2004. He added, almost paradoxically, that “drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies—the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about—is apparently immortal…”

If Hughes had visited Taos he might have changed his mind about the vigor and variety of contemporary drawings that originate within just a few square miles.

Artists are pursuing this age-old medium and redefining the rules, often using the most time-honored mediums: charcoal, pen and ink, chalk, and graphite. And the subjects are all over the map: from the late Gendron Jensen’s meditations on animal bones to Christine Taylor Patten’s miniature evocations of the cosmos to Marc Baseman’s unforgettably dysfunctional tableaux to Michelle Cooke’s breathtaking renderings of imaginary horizons. “Taos Draws!” affords a glimpse into the richness of the draftsmen (and women!) working here today.