Pat Steir is perhaps best known for her large-scale paintings of waves and waterfalls, but a recent exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design focused solely on Steir’s drawings. Organized by Jan Howard, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Museum, and Susan Harris, an independent curator, the exhibition reveals Steir’s abiding interest in the nature of line in both drawing and writing. Drawing and writing are each symbol systems based on line from which the viewer, bringing layers of references to bear, constructs meaning. Steir’s perception that writing and drawing are essentially the same enterprise remains the core principle of her drawing oeuvre. In her drawings, which often combine image and text, Steir repeatedly interrogates the fundamental human enterprise of conveying meaning through lines, a phenomenon that dates back to prehistoric times and links all cultures.

This ambitious exhibition, which consisted of fifty drawings in the six thousand square-foot space of the Chace Center at RISD, was not a retrospective per se, but was divided into five distinct groups of work: (1) 1970–1974, intimate early drawings, small and full of personal references; (2) 1975–1976, methodical experimentations with different types of scripts and drawing; (3) 1983–86, large-scale drawings of waves; (4) 1990s, a conceptually related category, waterfalls; (5) 2000s, drawings set on the background of grids that reflect Steir’s interest in gestural lines of great physicality These are a return to her past work and re-explore old themes.

Steir’s first body of work was produced in 1970, early in her career. The wall text informs us that Steir was a poet before she became a visual artist, and that “Steir naturally considered drawing and writing as one and the same.” Steir’s father once told her that if she could write, she could draw. This concept remains key for Steir. Her early drawings consist of disjointed, seemingly random image juxtapositions with descriptive titles such as Bird Head on Naked Male (1970) and Dog Head on Female Torso (1970). Within these early drawings, there are diverse types and styles of drawing, ranging from amazingly fine anatomical draftsmanship, to doodles, scribbles, dashes, dots, and smudges. Text is abundant, more notational (lists, isolated words) than fully grammatical script. This work also has deeply personal iconography. For example, there is an entire series called Fear Map (1971) with words such as “Idiot” and “NO” interspersed on compositions along with impenetrable black graphite squares, grids, and colored smudges. These works are reminiscent of journal entries that blend writing and drawing in a sort of stream of consciousness about her fears, insecurities, and more light-hearted musings. The numerous types of marks and lines on the surface, from crisp, precise, and linear to smoky, sketchy, and opaque, all work together as an exercise that explores how emotional or didactic meaning are conveyed differently.

These early, highly personal works gave way to a more rigorous interrogation of line characteristics. The wall text informs that after her earlier experimentation, Steir next explored and theorized about the nature of line. This work is dense with scribbles, grids, and types of penmanship, including cursive text and ABC’s written in block letters repeatedly to fill the entire composition. Sometimes writing is used in the same manner as a drawn line. For example, in Green Grass (1975–77), cursive text is used to construct landscapes. In this period Steir is most experimental and varied in her exploration of the line in writing and drawing, as well as how the nature of line contributes to meaning. Her keen interest in marks, symbols, meaning, and viewer reception was informed by, among other things, Conceptual art and the work of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, a German philosopher and mathematician who wrote about the relationship between symbols and meaning and developed most of the symbols used in calculus today.

The exhibition panels inform us that Steir did not draw much from 1977 to 1983, at which point she shifted radically from her more conceptual concerns to a more physical approach to drawing. Steir began to work on monumental surfaces making large sweeping gestural marks. Many of these drawings are comprised of vertically placed and densely accumulated thick graphite arcs or semi-circles, which convey the notion of a large wave rolling across the surface. The wall text explains that this work was inspired by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote about the “brute power of nature in its cacophony of line and scale” (as cited in a wall text). The wave drawings are dense with marks rendered on surfaces as large as five by fourteen feet in length. A rhythmic, powerful dynamic is on display. The obvious physical effort required by Steir to produce this work mimics the “brute power” of the waves themselves. The physical energy of making is conflated with the physical energy of nature and waves, so that the artist, her gesture, and the subject itself are merged.

This concept that the physical gesture and the material itself contributes to meaning (perhaps a nod to phenomenology) is carried into the next group of work about waterfalls. Characteristics of this work include densely scripted, wavy vertical lines suggesting falling, dripping water. Sometimes Steir used liquid ink and paint that she simply allowed to drip vertically on the surface to simulate the effects of gravity. In this work, Steir references many art-historical traditions, especially Japanese and Chinese calligraphy in which the line conveys meaning and expresses the artist’s personality at the same time. In American art history, the “drip” in painting has also become synonymous with Jackson Pollock. The range of associations that this simple gesture evokes—other cultures, other artists, as well as the ostensible subject itself, waterfalls—is deep. This density of art-historical references in Steir’s work increases as her career unfolds.

Her latest body of work from the past few years shows that Steir has reopened areas of inquiry previously explored. This late group of drawings merges many components of earlier work and represents a synopsis of sorts, as well as an attempt to go deeper into topics she has already explored but whose possibilities were not exhausted.

In the entry and exit to the gallery (the floor plan is circular), there was a site-specific floor-to-ceiling wall drawing titled Self-Portrait: An Installation that was conceptualized by Pat Steir and executed by herself and twelve students at RISD (led by Professor of Painting Dennis Congdon) over a two-week period. The wall was covered with red grids, with squares exactly executed in about one-foot sections. The students drew large-scale facial features culled from E. H. Gombrich’s 1961 book Art and Illusion, which he in turn had illustrated using Odoardo Fialetti’s (1573–1638) groundbreaking book, Tutte le Parti del Corpo, an anatomical handbook for artists. Fialetti’s handbook illustrates how to draw types of lips, noses, ears, eyes, eyebrows, etc., in a step-by-step process similar to how we learn to write letters. This Renaissance notion that we can learn to draw in the same manner as we learn to write has obvious resonance with Steir’s work. The communal manner of the execution of the wall drawing harkens back to periods in art history both in the distant past (master artist and apprentice relationships) and the not-so-distant past (Sol Lewitt). By labeling it a self-portrait, Steir inserts herself as an artist within the trajectory of art history, relating to and extending the mark-making of artists of the past. For a work so dense with art-historical references, the large disembodied facial features on a grid on the wall have a surprisingly humorous affect. A curled lip and a hairy ear seen without context can look comical.

Steir’s drawings, which have a rawer sensibility quality than her paintings, reveal an intimate sense of the artist’s thought processes. Overall, this exhibition of drawings constructs a narrative of her career and gives us a “graphic” sense of her journey from an inwardly focused approach to art to a more outward exploration of her place within the art-historical realm and nature at large. Her work deals fundamentally with the act of human communication in word and image: the inherent, universal drive to convey meaning and connect with others.

As an exhibition on drawings, it was logical that the curators restricted the number of paintings to only three, but it made this viewer curious to see and understand more about the relationship between Steir’s drawings and paintings. The accompanying catalogue addresses this very topic. The publication contains two essays written by the co-curators. Susan Harris, in the essay “Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line,” deftly contextualizes Steir’s drawings and discusses other artists, literature, and philosophies that influenced her work. Harris also addressed the topic of how Steir’s drawing influenced her painting practice. Jan Howard, in “Drawing Lessons: Pat Steir in Word and Image,” primarily deals with Steir’s many on-site wall drawings and their conceptual origins. Both essays are clear, well written, and have color illustrations.