Doodle Dandies

Untitled (bird with woman's head), by Marcel Dzama. Ink on paper, 18 x 23 inches. Courtesy Atelier Gallery.

Last fall, I wandered into Weird Woods, a show by artist Seth Scriver at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects on Toronto’s trendy Queen West gallery strip. After half an hour of looking at Scriver’s quirky little drawings of bushmen and furry blob creatures, I left with a nagging thought: is this the spawn of the Royal Art Lodge?

Now don’t get me wrong — I love the Royal Art Lodge, Canada’s most successful artist collective since General Idea, the Regina Five and, long before them, the Group of Seven. The RAL formed in Winnipeg in 1996, partly out of cheekiness (the members called themselves a “self-serving secret society”) and partly out of necessity (they were socially awkward art-school grads who only felt comfortable hanging out with each other). But their bizarre collaborative drawings — such as a girl standing arm in arm with a squid, or two young geishas presenting food offerings to a giant hamster — struck a chord with the general public and the art world alike for their charm and idiosyncratic humour. Within a few years, the RAL went from selling drawings out of a suitcase for five bucks to a group show at the venerable Drawing Center in New York. Marcel Dzama emerged as the group’s perceived leader; his root beer and pigment drawings of tree-men, gangster molls, cowboys, bears and sinister bunnies earned him an international cult following.

While Dzama and his buddies have gone on to successful solo careers, surely the success of the RAL hasn’t escaped the notice of younger Canadian artists. And, in an age where the market holds greater sway over artists than ever before, it’s hard not to wonder if there aren’t more than a few opportunistic hustlers out there working “in the style of” Dzama and the RAL in order to get gallery representation and make a quick buck.

There’s a fine line between being influenced by an artist and doing knockoffs of his or her work, and I feared that Seth Scriver had crossed it.

Bushwacker, by Seth Scriver. Courtesy Seth Scriver.

Turns out I was dead wrong. When I called Scriver up, he told me that he’d been drawing his whole life and had only come across the RAL a couple of years ago, at the Drawing Center show. (At the time, he simply thought, “Cool! They’re Canadian!”) Since then, Scriver often hears people compare his work to that of the RAL; he finds it flattering, but also “kind of annoying when it’s the only comment they make,” because it implies his art isn’t original. While he admits to liking the Royal Art Lodge, Scriver says it hasn’t really influenced him.

Instead, it turns out that Scriver and the Royal Art Lodge are part of a much wider art trend: a huge resurgence in drawing. Richard Heller, who owns a gallery in Santa Monica, California, that shows Dzama and former fellow RAL member Neil Farber (as well as other Canadian drawing hotshots like Jason McLean and Jeff Ladouceur), says that in the last few years, drawing has gone from being a so-called secondary medium to a primary medium. While artists have always made drawings, it was usually as a preparatory sketch for an idea that was only fully realized in a painting, sculpture, installation or another medium. Now, it seems it’s okay to be known as an artist who draws.

Seth Scriver doesn’t limit himself to works on paper — for example, he also does hilarious animation and video — but drawing is his main preoccupation. He was strongly influenced by cartoons, comic books and especially the graffiti he saw around him growing up in downtown Toronto. He likes the “bad-assedness” of graffiti, saying it’s more edgy and in-your-face than most gallery work. He also likes the idea of “free art” — art that’s immediate and uncensored. The funny little hybrid creatures that populate Scriver’s Weird Woods drawings are a cross between his own experience, his imagination and the stories he used to hear from his dad, who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company back before snowmobiles replaced dog sleds. So while Scriver’s drawings share some surface similarities with the RAL — a cartoonish style, strange creatures and murky narratives — his work is very much his own.

Untitled, by Jeff Ladouceur. 14 x 11 inches, graphite on paper. Courtesy Richard Heller Gallery.

That isn’t to say that the Royal Art Lodge hasn’t had a huge influence on Canadian artists. Toronto-based curator Wayne Baerwald says that the Winnipeggers did a lot to popularize a “lo-tech, no-tech, do-it-yourself provisional aesthetic” among younger artists — the idea that an artist can create art out of any material, and do many things simultaneously. Though drawing has been its main medium, Baerwald points out that the RAL has never been solely about drawing — it has also done performances, music, video, conceptual pieces, even puppets and dolls.

Gallery owner Katharine Mulherin maintains that the RAL has been instrumental in bringing a sense of fun back to art. She recalls the group’s Drawing Center show as a kind of tonic for many visitors used to seeing more serious art. “The enjoyment and fun I saw people having after a day of New York galleries was just so great,” she recalls. “It really made you want to go out and be creative.”

Robert Enright, a writer and professor of art criticism at the University of Guelph, has followed the RAL since its inception, and says the group’s influence has been profound in another way. The Drawing Center exhibition sent a message to young artists across Canada that you don’t have to be in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal to have a shot at success. No matter where you live, you can do your own crazy little thing and potentially attract worldwide attention. Enright adds that Marcel Dzama is now unquestionably an international benchmark for young artists who draw.

So what gives? How did drawing get so hot? Baerwald and Enright feel that a lot of it started back in the early 1980s with American artist Raymond Pettibon, who adopted a comic-book style of art, combining drawings and text that referred equally to pop culture and “high” culture, philosophy and politics. But Pettibon was something of a voice in the wilderness amongst a generation of artists who preferred photography, slick video and vivid Neo-Expressionist paintings. According to Baerwald, it was a new, younger generation of artists who, in an attempt to define themselves in contrast to their elders, revived the somewhat forgotten art of drawing.

Mulherin notes that at recent art fairs, she’s seen more and more works on paper, especially by emerging artists showing with younger galleries. She says that Toronto artist Shari Boyle was reluctant to display her drawings for a while precisely because she felt there was too much drawing around.

Untitled, by Mike Parsons.

That doesn’t stop others, though. One of Toronto’s hottest young artists, Mike Parsons, regularly parks himself on the pavement on Queen West to sell his fabulous black-and-white drawings. And what should I see at the Ontario College of Art and Design during their recent Graduate Exhibition but a roomful of collaborative drawings by faculty and students up for silent auction.

This resurgence of drawing is good news, because it’s still the best way to find out if an artist has manual skill and/or innate talent. It’s wonderful to see where the artist’s hand has traced a line on the paper. Drawing is such a private pursuit; it has a meditative quality and a quietness to it. It’s a wonderful act of resistance in a culture that often tends to favour the loudest and most techno-savvy. The return to drawing is part of a wider aesthetic revolution that values authenticity, intimacy and individual human striving (even if it fails) in the face of money and power. It’s part of an aesthetic that includes low-budget films and, more recently, the rough-around-the-edges sound of podcasting.

Like low-budget flicks and podcasts, there’s bound to be a lot of bad to mediocre drawing out there. But that’s not the point. The point is that what we see around us is evidence of what we value and yearn for. Drawing is the antithesis to the “grand gesture” in art and globalization in politics. It’s about the human touch.

Sascha Hastings is a Toronto arts writer and the new curator of Design at Riverside at Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ontario.