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DrAwing ThoughTs

A Series of Small Drawings

Madeline Silber

Pas de deux, a dance of line and space

Mary Murray, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art Munson Museum of Art, Utica, NY

Madeline Silber’s paintings are composed of sensuous, floating forms in jewel tones. The gestures of these forms reveal an intimate choreography of brushing touches and more complicated entanglements. Silber’s new ink drawings manifest a similar impulse, but given the material and the processes of drawing, they are all energized line.

The drawings are numbered thoughts. Each gives the impression of unselfconscious germination, manifesting in the release of physical and emotional energy, from hand through pen to page. They often display the embellishment of surface-pattern design, but can also be understood as intimations of living organisms. In this way, Silber’s drawings are naturally akin to Surrealism, from which the practice of automatic mark-making was believed to plumb the depths of one’s psyche and uncover truths buried within the subconscious. For many Surrealists who lived in Europe during its volatile interwar period, the imagery is aggressive—even violent—and sexual. Silber’s compositions do include bulbous forms, open circles, and interpenetrating shapes, sensuously rendered and suggestive of intimacy achieved or thwarted. Silber’s works, however, are more likely to exude the essence of tenderness and play than of pain. Closer in spirit is the work of Louise Bourgeois (American, born in France, 1911-2010), particularly her drawings that describe an upright form sketched with ink in parallel lines. A good comparison can be made between Silber’s thoughts 8, 2021, and Bourgeois’s untitled drawing from 1949, made with ball-point and fiber-tip pens, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2005.139.

Silber limits each drawing to six-by-six-inch paper and typically uses only one or two colors of ink. From these parameters, there is, nevertheless, a dynamic play of

formal relationships: between stasis and motion, darkness and light, two and three dimensions, figure and ground. The character of each drawing depends on Silber’s calibration of line density, color, and degree of decoration. Throughout the series, spatial relationships are ever-shifting, as line and form make or miss connections. Often there is little rest because the flurry of activity doesn’t allow for touching down from surging spirals of ink.

Consider some examples of Silber’s choreography that produce great expressive range.

Thoughts 18, 2022, in pink and black ink, is a gem of art nouveau tracery. Its lines and patterns simultaneously evoke the hand-crafted, as if it were a design for glittering jewelry, as well as the organic, such as a fuchsia plant or nautilus shell. It is swirling movement, a visualization of ineffable flow moving inexorably to the right. Silber accomplishes this with black ink as a grounding weight that lightens as the line rises upward and over.

Drawing with purple and black ink, Silber applied a similar pattern in thoughts 20, but the darker palette combines with denser shapes that lower this thought to a richer, deeper register. Most of the drawing fills the upper two-thirds of the page, with an ambiguous, pump-like form resting below. This form is similar to the animated shapes in her paintings and is reminiscent of abstracted figure-forms of French Surrealist Yves Tanguy (1900-55). A notable difference between this drawing and thoughts 18 (and others in the series) is the appearance of a base or floor. It further grounds the image, especially because Silber shaded the area as if the form were an object in three dimensions. The spatial addition makes the free-floating drawings like thoughts 18 feel that much airier.

Spatially, thoughts 16, 2022, exists somewhere between floating and grounded. Given the illusionistic shelf and the verticality of the form at right, the image could be understood as a plant in a vase. It can also be anthropomorphized as a figure

on a balcony. With this reading, the cascade of lines spiraling from the top might be so many thoughts spilling widely from an over-active, Covid-captive mind. Silber keeps it light, though, with so much white paper as a backdrop. In this scenario, this thought is a funny image of a big, expressive personality.

Thoughts 27, 2023, is minimal compared to the other works in the series. It is a simple study in parallel lines, but Silber adds dimension by bending the strokes and placing them on a curve. They are transformed from ink on paper to the visualization of movement and sound.

With such seemingly simple choices of pink rather than black ink, or the placement of the pen on the page and moving the nib just so, Madeline Silber opens multiple little worlds, all different. Each one conjures its own sensations, from agitation to contemplation; looking at these small pieces of paper, one experiences the effects of confinement, its pleasures and its restrictions. These drawings, initiated as a release during isolation, open portions of the page to bright white, even in the compositions with the densest application of line and ink. There is always breathing room within each dance of lines in space.

© Mary Murray

Thoughts 14, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2022

Thoughts 26, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2023

Thoughts 23, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2023

Thoughts 6, ink on paper, 6" x 6" 2021

Thoughts 2, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2021

Thoughts 25, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2023

Thoughts 7, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2021, private collection

1, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2021

Thoughts

Thoughts 28, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2023

Thoughts 4, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2021

Thoughts 15, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2021

Thoughts 20, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2022

Thoughts 22, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2023

Thoughts 17, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2022

Thoughts 16, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2022

Thoughts 19, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2022

Thoughts 27, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2023

Thoughts 8, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2021

Thoughts 18, ink on paper, 6" x 6", 2022

This project is made possible with public funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and administered by The Earlville Opera House.

A grant from SUNY Oneonta Faculty Research & Creative Activity Grant Program also provided funding for this project.

Drawing Thoughts, a series of small drawings will take place at the Huntington Memorial Library, Oneonta, NY, February 15–March 22, 2024.

Special thanks to Mary Murray, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Munson Museum, for contributing her insightful essay Pas De Deux, a dance of line and space, and to Tina Winstead, Director, Huntington Memorial Library, for graciously supporting the SCR grant and hosting the exhibit.

ISBN: 979-8-218-37435-8