Drawing is both the most elementary thing an artist can do and one of the most elevated.Artists draw as dancers stretch. A drawing can be part of a preliminary planning stage to alarger work in sculpture, installation, painting or performance. Or, like an attenuated arabesque,it can exist as a form of art in its own right.

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The artists chosen for Drawn to the Wall-Mary Farrell, Melissa Lang, Mel McCuddin, TomO'Day and Dan Spalding-are all working artists who reside in Spokane, but their art is widelydivergent. Farrell has an established national reputation as a printmaker. Lang is known forher wonderfully loose abstract paintings. O'Day has received respect (and notoriety) for hisdecade-long conceptual project The World's First Art Disposal Service. McCuddin and Spaldingboth do rich and richly different figurative painting and drawing.

While it is somewhat true that every art community is small, it is especially true in Spokane.As different as these artists are in working methods, they share a rather tight proximity. Anumber of them consistently exhibit in galleries and museums around the country and abroad,but the daily praxis of making art in this city is one of continual contact. As a celebration ofcommunity, exhibiting these five working artists together makes sense.

But curator Scott Patnode added an aspect of near gamesmanship to Drawn to the Wall.Referencing Jim Dine's heroic eight-day marathon, when he covered the walls of theLudwigsburg Kunstverein near Stuttgart, Germany with his charcoal drawings, Patnode askedthese five artists to participate in this exhibition within the set time of two weeks. He alsostated that they were each to work on identically sized, portable walls of 8 by 12 feet. In orderto avoid any conflicts, he further stated that he would then arrange the walls based on his owncuratorial decision. These parameters, along with the fact that the works are temporary, since

the walls will be repainted after the duration of the exhibit, add an exciting irisson to theproject.

What might have been an exhibition based on locale, now becomes an exhibition about process,time, and the artlstsreactlon to the site-as well as their reaction to one another.

Dine is not alone in doing on-site drawings. In relatively recent times artists FrancescoClemente, Jean Michel Basquiat, and GRONK have all covered gallery walls with marks. Butthe pre-modern tradition of wall paintings might be a more relevant reference for this drawingshow. Like ancient cave paintings, Drawn to the Wall will not only offer viewers works thatwere made on site, but it will be works made by a community of artists who know one another.

Recipient of the Artists Trust Fellowship as well as numerous other grants, Mary Farrell'sexhibition record spans several continents. Currently represented by Seattle's DavidsonGalleries, Farrell moved to Spokane from Cincinnati six years ago. Her work is figurative in amanner that feels far from traditional. She lets the material and technique dominate as if sheis letting the viewer into a contemporary paradox. Today we admire the handmade print notfor its reproducibility, but for the sheer beauty of the "impact" image. As a printmaker she letsthe medium determine her quality of line. For example in her Nest series, tight lines run intoand over one another, their softened mezzotint turning each nest into a compact weaving ofmarks. By the time Farrell embarked on her Floating World Series and her series on hands,she was utilizing the delicate lyrical lines found in the Ukiyo-E print tradition, although theformer was done in western intaglio style, and the latter is being done in woodblock. Likemost printmakers, Farrell remains close to the drawing process, Upon being invited to workon this project, she says that her first thought was to welcome the challenge, "the risk" of

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responding to a specified time and the large scale. Over the next year, her work will betouring the U.K. in an exhibition titled Relativities and the U.S. in Ten Women Printmakers.

Melissa Lang is a Spokane native represented by the Gail Severn Gallery in Sun Valley andthe Lorinda Knight Gallery in Spokane. She returned here to live after receiving her MFAfrom the University of New Orleans. She is also a recipient of the Artists Trust Fellowship,and she has received attention for her lush, biomorphic abstractions. She is a painter'spainter in the sense that her abstractions intimate real space while never quite delving intorepresentation. Her ability to vest her painted and drawn forms with light gives her work adense, almost psychological presence. Her paintings, such as Green Ring: Vortex andCirculation, while loaded with color, are dominated by forms which are as close to drawn as"painted" forms can get. Lang sees her drawing and painting as interconnected. "I try todraw with paint and paint with charcoal. I start all my paintings with drawings because mydrawings are a way for me to tap into the source-a way of navigating my feelings." Lang'swork can be seen in the Eloquent Flower exhibition at the Gail Severn Gallery.

Like Lang, Mel McCuddin is a Spokane native. His work is in a number of museum collections,and he too received an Artists Trust award-all the more remarkable because McCuddindidn't come down the well-worn path of the MFA. Now in his late 60's, McCuddin was a truckdriver less than a decade ago. He admits to working intuitively, and the flattened pictureplane of his paintings, populated by loosely rendered people and animals, recalls earlyExpressionism. He doesn't see his success as remarkable. " I have taken some classes, butin a sense all of us are self-taught." He continues, "Like everyone, every time I make apainting I learn something new." There is genuine warmth, even gentleness to his work, yetoddly enough it was one of McCuddin's works that prompted a public controversy still referred

to today. In the late 1980's, McCuddin's painting of a man hoisting an upside down US flagwas displayed at Eastern Washington University and was immediately declared "unpatriotic"by members of a Veterans group. The artist's intent was to make a work about farmers'economic distress, and the ensuing public debate surprised McCuddin. He claims thatwhile not all of his paintings have a social statement, he doesn't shy away from controversy,claiming that he is simply "trying to make work that can't easily be forgotten."

Tom O'Day moved here from Los Angeles, initially in search of reasonable rent. He has hadsolo exhibitions at Los Angeles' Space Gallery, at the UC Northridge Gallery, as well asnumerous group shows around the country. A recipient of the Artists Trust Fellowship amongother grants, for the past ten years 0' Day has been making installations and performancesabout the art making process. He has received national attention for his longest performancework, the War/d's First Art Disposal Service. For this project he has buried, burned, submergedin water, and otherwise abridged existing artworks. As an integral part of these 'anti-art'performances, O'Day has always taken the remnants of these acts and used them as materialfor new art. His central idea is one of transition. He reminds us that new work comes fromthe old and that art, like all other matter, is constantly in a state of flux. Such activities havedrawn some critics and collectors to compare his work to the earlier 1960's FLUXUSmovement, yet these same critics are often surprised by O'Day's resolutely cool and beautifulaesthetics. He will be having a solo exhibition of his work at the Washington State UniversityGallery in fall, 2002, a~d will be included in a group exhibition entitled A Tribute to Space &its Artists in New York City this December.

Dan Spalding, like McCuddin, comes to art making by a circuitous route. The youngest ofthese five artists, he received a bachelor's degree in business in 1989, and a few years ago

he bought two buildings primarily to "find adequate studio space" for himself. The two buildingsrepresent the better, more bohemian part of Spokane's downtown revitalization, also housinga coffeehouse on the eastern end of the city's center. Spalding's work, like McCuddin's, isalso figurative and expressionistic, but rather than working with an abstracted picture plane,Spalding vests each 'of his portraits or paintings of flowers with deeply colored chiaroscuroand impasto painting style. Although he returned to Spokane after studying at the Art StudentsLeague in New York City, he claims his eight years of working with Gonzaga professor BobGilmore were pivotal in his decision to paint. He has taught at both the Spokane Art Schooland Gonzaga University, but wishes to devote himself to painting full time. His work isrepresented by Art at Work Gallery in Spokane, and he will be having a solo exhibition at theOmni Gallery in Portland in the fall of 2001.

When you read this, the Jundt Galleries will be filled with five drawings on five portable walls.Yet as I write this, I have no idea of the outcome and can only speculate on the strength ofthese five individuals' work. There is a performance aspect here that makes this more thanan exhibition. That the work will differ greatly should be understood from the abbreviatedinformation in the biographies above. That the selected, identical drawing surfaces lend akind of loose continuity to the exhibit will be obvious to the serious art lover. But the intangiblegift to all of us viewers is that we will get to see the results-not only of five specific artworksbut of five specific artworks made.at the same time, in the same space, by five members ofour community. It is an opportunity.

Frances DeVuonoFrances De Vuono is an artist, art writer and contributing editor for Artweek.

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This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign 2000-2001.© Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington 99258-0001.