Christopher Wilmarth: Twelve Drawings from the Forty-Fourth Year: Delancey Backs No. 12, 1987

In 1987, the year he died, Wilmarth produced a series of ghostly, gestural pencil drawings that suggest the transience of the human form. His description of his works as “instruments of evocation” applies perfectly to these works on paper. In their suggestion of form emerging and dissipating, their shifts between figuration and abstraction, these drawings exhibit the artist’s control over the slightest changes in the pressure of his hand.

On a rectangular field of paper edged with an irregular wash of gesso, Wilmarth created an image out of marks and incisions. The ground is cream with a greenish-gray hue; the chalky gesso varies in thickness and intensity. Occupying the near-center of the visual field is a vertical figure of gently shaded pencil marks; about a third of the way down from the crown of the figure are two roughly symmetrical ovals that lend it an anthropomorphic quality. The darkest lines are concentrated toward the middle of the figure; pressure on the pencil tapers off considerably toward the bottom of the image, as does the degree of differentiation of the line. Considerable oscillation occurs between line and figure, an effect reinforced by smudges and erasures.

This layering of the picture plane is enhanced by five rectangles incised into the ground. They are vertical, echoing the orientation of both the figure and the composition. The orientation of the image is also underscored by the fact that the incised verticals of the lower register of the drawing exceed their rectangles. Of these, three are so delicate that it is difficult at first to read them as cuts. Yet in the largest incision, to the right of one of the ovals, the ground is indented slightly so that the cut becomes almost sculptural. Along with Wilmarth’s use of pencil, these cuts create a multilevel surface rich in shadow, tonality, and texture.