By HeeSoo Alice Lee
Drawing is often described as the beginning of something, a sketch or idea before something—anything—is set in stone. Solomon Salim Moore, the academic curator at the Benton and the organizer of this exhibition, and I, his curatorial assistant, had many questions from the start. Some became almost philosophical; they transitioned into conversations regarding habit, belief, remembrance, and experience. Students are taught in elementary art classes that the simple meaning of drawing is the act of putting marks on paper. However, to ask what drawing is today requires looking beyond learned responses and considering what drawing does. This consideration is essential because contemporary drawing often operates as a mode of thinking, a way of being, and a means of engaging with memory, identity, and environment. It goes beyond the physical action of mark-making. Furthermore, what does it mean to draw from and within a place like Los Angeles? What does it mean to allow a place to influence the work?
Line, Smudge, Shade: Contemporary Drawing in Our Los Angeles features the work of sixteen artists who are invested in drawing. I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with each artist in preparation for the show, and I was granted the opportunity to see how these artists treat drawing not as a fixed medium but as an ongoing process. As I learned about each individual artist and their process, I realized that they were not just making drawings. They were also reaching out to the city—to its residue, its memory, its immediacy.
The dual nature of drawing, as both a noun and a verb, refers to the tangible outcome and an active, evolving process of mark-making. My thoughts and observations of drawing, in both senses of the term, continue to grow and develop. Line, Smudge, Shade is certainly not a conclusion but a return to exploring what drawing does best: raise questions that don’t demand an answer. In this essay, I will highlight the practices of four artists featured in the exhibition as case studies in how the city of Los Angeles can be both the material and the source. The city can be used directly in the making of a drawing, or indirectly as context. Alongside these examples, I will also explore how Los Angeles itself functions as a muse, not just as scenery but as a presence that shapes artists’ work. Finally, I will reflect on how drawing remains a viable, flexible solution to modern-day complexities through its emphasis on slowness and observation.
Joel Freeman’s graphite rubbings on found paper over found objects in Los Angeles. Photo: HeeSoo Alice Lee
For artists in the show such as Joel Freeman and Sterling Wells, the city is the material. They embed the city directly in their work. In their drawings, process-based approaches blend physical contact with the city into urban texture, water, and surface. Joel’s rubbings are an index to the city, taking into account quintessential LA: from walls in abandoned Koreatown buildings to various ad-strewn telephone poles and sidewalk plaques. His physical imprints of the city become portable portals, a showcase of the structure and quality of a place. Though each work captures only fragments of the urban landscape, together they evoke the larger presence of Los Angeles.
Sterling Wells's Absorption and Degradation (2018/2025) in his studio. Photo: HeeSoo Alice Lee
While Freeman presses the surface of the city onto paper, Sterling Wells lets the city soak in to his work, using water from LA waterways to prepare his surface before any mark is made. This kind of material intimacy exemplifies how one’s environment can be the beginning of drawing. It is a symbolic act of immersion and absorption. Though Wells’s works are mostly in watercolor—a medium not always associated with drawing—they are connected to drawing in his core concern of mark-making and recording the influence of his environment. If some artists draw with the city, Freeman and Wells draw from it, treating it as a source that permeates their work. The difference is subtle but meaningful.
For other artists in the show like Carly França and Stas Orlovski, the city is not so much the material itself but the source of that material. Carly França’s drawings, created from the ashes of the remains of her home following the Eaton Fire, reflect on a place without physical imprint. She draws from memory and from loss. To me, her work reads as a meditation in and of itself; it is less of a response to external stimuli and more a slow accumulation of time and observation. It is not the product of sudden inspiration but rather the outcome of years of residency, of witnessing change and enduring loss. Years of living, watching, and returning to the same questions have shaped the form of her drawings as much as any deliberate mark she makes. For França, the city is not a surface but something that is internalized, mourned, and remembered. Her home becomes the source of her material and a direct reflection and record of what once was, what remains, and what can no longer be seen.
Carly França, Backyard with a View, 2025. Reclaimed Charcoal from the Eaton Fire and rust on paper, 24 x 18 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Sourcing his materials directly from specialized art suppliers in Los Angeles, Stas Orlovski turns internalizations, like França’s, outward. Beginning with the materials themselves, Orlovski’s drawings are derived from a broader citywide network of making. His compositions emerge from found surfaces from secondhand and charity stores and paper from shops such as Hiromi Paper—all located around his studio in Culver City. At Hiromi, Orlovski selects handmade Japanese papers, which range from delicate washi to thick, fibrous mulberry sheets. These papers, prized for their texture and responsiveness to ink and pigment, introduce a physical sensitivity to the work that is often absent in commercially produced materials. They carry with them a legacy of craftsmanship and tradition as well as reflect the hyperlocal specificity of where and how they are chosen. The city is brought in not as a backdrop but as a collaborator. By embracing the irregularities and history of Los Angeles, Orlovski’s drawings are not only about images he renders on page but also about the layers of labor and circulation that bring his works into being. Incorporating the city’s overlooked materials suggest that drawing can be an act of reclamation, both materially and conceptually. This practice embodies a choreography between mark-making and place.
Stas Orlavski’s Winter Landscape with Fallen Figure (2025) displayed in his studio. Photo: HeeSoo Alice Lee
Los Angeles is an unstable, open-ended presence. As I grow and reflect year by year on personal changes in my character, modes of thinking, and new hyperfixations, I also realize how much the city has adjusted itself alongside me, continually shaped by and shaping those that live in it. In this way, it reflects many of the same qualities as drawing. In the works of the artists in this exhibition, the city is an active force that guides them through their work and moves with them and their art practices. Each drawing holds a piece of the city’s structure, both physical and imagined. As the act of drawing resists containment, so does the environment from which these artists draw their inspiration and material. When artists allow the city to suggest what a drawing might be, rather than the other way around, the city becomes a metaphor for contemplation, meditation, and experimentation.
As I consider the artists, practices, and methods that I have been exposed to throughout the making of Line, Smudge, Shade, I have come to the realization that perhaps drawing is not a matter of utility, but of proximity. Thought, impulse, and memory are called to attention when one draws, and in that sense, drawing also becomes less of a tool and more of a position. It is an attitude of staying-with and deliberation. It invites failure, repetition, and hesitation. It welcomes documentation and devotion. In a digital age in which most questions can be answered quickly, with clarity and precision, the act of drawing is a resistance to containment and neutrality. Drawing is a reminder of the joys of commitment to a place, a community, and to oneself, and it is the ineffable nature of drawing that keeps it alive—shifting, evolving, and expanding.
