Gage Academy Advanced Drawing Seminar: The Finished Line
Curated by Kathy Roseth
June 4 - 28, 2026
First Thursday Art Walk - Thursday June 4th, 5-8pm
Artist Panel Discussion - Saturday June 13th, 2-4pm
Closing Reception - Saturday June 27th, 4-6pm
This exhibit celebrates drawing as a primal and powerful mode of human expression, unrelated to its usefulness in preparatory studies for paintings and sculptures. Curated by Kathy Roseth, alongside seminar members and instructor Geoff Flack.
Drawing is immediate and personal in a way that eludes highly finished paintings, perhaps because the bare marks on the paper seem so close in time and space to the hand that made them and the mind that desired them. Perhaps it’s because the black and white media of pencil and charcoal satisfy that primitive part of our brain that delights in seeing the world in shades of gray, as we did when we were infants. For whatever reason, we stand in front of a well-made drawing and are amazed at how beautiful it is, for all its simplicity.
Reviewing the history of drawing in Western art, we note a few things:
Drawing came first. The Lascaux cave paintings in France date to over 17,000 years ago -- eerily contemporary-seeming red, yellow and black images of large animals drawn in local mineral-based pigments, iron oxides, manganese dioxide, charcoal. The drawing impulse is fundamental to humans.
Drawing has always been central to artistic practice. Sculptures and paintings are made of hardier stuff than works on paper and many have come down through the ages to us intact, while millions of drawings have been lost. But we know from the scraps that have survived that artists in every era have filled notebooks with sketches, capturing gestures, testing compositions and working out ideas.
Before the 19th century, most “finished” drawings were probably templates for etchings and engravings. From the invention of the printing press forward, images have been captured, reproduced and distributed affordably by various print-making technologies. Durer and Rembrandt created magnificent drawings for the trade.
Like everything else, drawing has changed with changes in technology. For example, high-quality processed graphite wasn’t available until the 1790’s, offering artists for the first time an easily portable, durable medium capable of making fine lines, thick strokes and deep shadows without smudging. Constable and Ingres both used graphite sticks to create delicate finished works.
Drawing became a regular medium for finished work in the 19th century and has been flourishing ever since. Sargent offered his clients the option of lower-cost charcoal portraits. William Blake filled his books with finished pen and ink drawings. Georges Seurat “painted” with charcoal in creating his dark shimmering portraits of his mother. Kathe Kollwitz chose to work exclusively in charcoal and other graphic media as unpretentious and affordable options consistent with her passion for social justice. Picasso brought extraordinary mastery to the drawn line and with Matisse may have created the modern appetite for simple, gestural, highly expressive drawings. And now, in the no-holds-barred twenty first century, drawing masters abound in abstract and conceptual art as well as new incarnations of figurative work.
The thirteen members of Gage Academy’s Advanced Drawing Seminar have all gone through one or more of Gage’s formal atelier programs and are out in the world now making art. The seminar is led by artist and master draftsman Geoff Flack, who created Gage’s Core Drawing Atelier and taught many of us most of what we know about drawing. We meet weekly at Gage’s satellite campus in Georgetown to draw from the model, critique each other’s work, share information about art materials and techniques, tease each other, and grow in the group’s encouragement and support.
Reference materials:
The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art, by Susan Owens, Yale University Press, 2026)
Contemporary Drawing: Key Concepts and Techniques, by Margaret Davidson, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 2011