Drawing 1954

This drawing by Frederick Sommer presents a figure with a guitar rendered with graphite, crayon and colored pencil on paper. The composition seems to revel in the immediacy of artmaking, Sommer not only accepts but emphasizes the inherent imperfection of the gesture. The artwork itself is striking because of its starkness: the dark background allows each mark to register as something almost glowing, a series of luminous lines forming a silhouetted shape. Look at the red around the head and shoulder area and how the lines don’t quite meet but somehow suggest so much. It's very thin in some areas, thick in others. Like the way the white lines near the foot fade out suggesting a sense of movement. You can almost hear the distorted wail of a guitar chord. It reminds me of the drawings of Cy Twombly, in their shared interest in line as a method of thinking, but also, in their shared desire to see how the simplest mark can be an expression of profound emotion. Rather than reaching for concrete meaning, Sommer, like Twombly, prompts us to accept art's inherent ambiguity and embrace multiple readings.