Contemporary drawing practice

In contemporary visual art practice, drawing, besides all else, is an end in itself. When drawing is seen as a preparatory act alone, drawings are rarely exhibited in a museum setting and give way to those media that have a cultural history as important. Still, this preparatory aspect of drawing has allowed it to become a widely varying visual activity: skill, medium, tool for exploration, generator of possibilities, problem-solver, research activity. The casualness, intimacy, directness, and unencumberedness of drawing have made it transient and permanent, informal and disciplined, a sketch and a masterwork, on a page and on a wall, in higher dimensional forms, generated by pencil or mouse, the beginning and the end, the most naked expression of the artist. 

Of all contemporary visual practice, drawing is the most basic, the most embracing, the most permissive of play, the most flexible and open to exploration of process and the least weighed down by its own history and expectations.