Red Lines from Midpoint of the Left Side and the Upper Left Corner, Blue Lines from the Midpoint of the Bottom Side and the Lower Right Corner 1975

Sol LeWitt created this drawing, with red and blue lines, and text, at some point in his career. It’s a drawing that seems to propose its own method, its own rules. The drawing has the quality of a system, and it's a system that is visible. The surface of the paper isn’t really concealed, the lines are sharp and clear, almost diagrammatic. Each one starts from a point on the edge and extends into the field of the plane. It feels like the mapping out of a set of instructions, like a flow chart, or maybe even a knitting pattern. I find myself thinking of Agnes Martin, an earlier artist, who also drew lines on paper in a quasi-systematic way. But where Martin’s drawings are subtle and delicate, LeWitt’s have a kind of brute force about them. They are not trying to be beautiful, but simply, demonstrably, what they are. Ultimately, this piece feels like a set of prompts for making art, rather than a finished artwork itself. It invites the viewer to imagine and enact the instructions contained within it.