Fragments 1962

Here is a drawing by James McGarrell, and it’s called Fragments. There's a sense of a mind at work here, a roving eye, making notations, trying to fix a thought. It’s a delicate dance of graphite on paper, with the artist teasing out forms from a cloud of marks. Look at the way the figures emerge and recede, a constant push and pull between presence and absence. I imagine McGarrell circling his subject, lost in contemplation. The charcoal whispers across the page, building up tone, finding edges, only to let them dissolve again. There's a vulnerability in the tentative lines. A sense of the artist grappling with the complexities of representation, embracing the inherent fragmentation of perception. In a way, that feels very human, doesn't it? It reminds me of other artists who work in series, Gerhard Richter for example, and it shows how each mark is part of an ongoing exploration, a conversation across time and space.