Jack Youngerman at the Drawing Room

Over the course of a career spanning more than 50 years, Jack Youngerman has created a focused and resonant vocabulary of abstract images. Those images, inspired by the forms and processes of the natural world, and informed equally by the high modernism of Matisse and the wide-ranging decorative tradition, have appeared in a variety of mediums, materials and scales. The recent works on paper that he showed at the Drawing Room serve both to consolidate a group of ongoing ideas (many of which were examined in his relief paintings of the last few years) and to explore fresh territory. They are done in colored pencil, a new medium for Youngerman, and a particularly apt choice for these drawings.

The look of work done in colored pencil can vary considerably. Colored pencil is useful for quick sketching and rapid color studies, but it is also capable of great chromatic and textural richness if it is painstakingly worked. In this group of drawings, Youngerman layers color upon color, varies his density and uses the paper's grain to achieve understated atmospheric effects. He also pays particular attention to the edges of his forms--keeping them sharp or feathering them, taking a color all the way out to the border or interposing a transitional tone. Youngerman has a sure sense of color's structural properties, and one of his strengths is knowing how much compositional weight an individual color will bear and how much space it can effectively fill.

These 26 rather small-scale drawings each take an articulated central form and place it within a background shape that hovers on the larger expanse of white paper. That background shape is most often a circle or an oval, and the central form has either a clearly symmetrical or an asymmetrical organization. Little Redondo (2002), one of the asymmetrical pieces, juxtaposes two deep-blue biomorphic shapes--the bottom one a curved triangle with rounded corners and the larger top one a shape vaguely similar in form, but canted onto its side and then stretched out and pulled, so that it partially wraps around the right side of the lower form. Smaller swirls of blue extend from the main bodies, forming a tenuous connection between the two shapes, and the blue elements themselves are enclosed in a halolike disk of rich burnt orange. The whole ensemble, with its finely tuned complementary colors and its softened edges, seems to pulse with a kind of generative energy. There is a sense in this drawing (and in much of Youngerman's work) of natural processes unfolding--of seeds sprouting, of embryonic forms developing.

This organic tendency is shown to excellent effect in Hex/ Round (2002). Here, a sky-blue circle holds three nested trefoil forms--the outer one green, the middle red, and the inner black--which in turn enclose three identical rounded light-blue shapes folded over at their median points. The image has the feeling of an exotic fruit sliced through the middle, a symmetrical group of dividing cells or (looking at it a slightly different way) a Japanese ornamental motif--a textile design or an identifying seal. Youngerman has dealt with this kind of evocative imagery for many years, and it is heartening to see that his inventiveness and elan remain undiminished.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning