To express what only drawing will allow

VISUAL ART: Dobell Drawing Prize. Art Gallery of NSW.

Suzanne Archer received $25,000 by winning the 2010 Dobell Prize for Drawing for her work Derangement.

VISUAL ART: Dobell Drawing Prize. Art Gallery of NSW.

THE Dobell Drawing Prize makes an interesting contrast with the Prat Collection of 19th-century French drawings that has just closed at the Art Gallery of NSW. It's not just that the Prat was full of exceptional drawings while the standard of the Dobell is rather ordinary; it's that every drawing in the Prat Collection was distinctive and different, and too many of those in the Dobell have a certain dreary sameness and predictability. If you closed your eyes and imagined what you would be likely to see in a contemporary drawing show, you wouldn't be very surprised by anything here.

The paradox in all this is that the sameness is the result of a determination to be different; everybody is trying not to do what they think of as a conventional drawing. But what is that?

In the Prat Collection, there were hardly two works that were doing the same thing or with the same materials. What made them interesting, even in some cases fascinating, was the necessity that motivated the making of each one for its specific purpose.

Here, on the contrary, one feels the artists are scratching around looking for something worth saying.

If you can overcome a certain initial impression of ennui, there are some pieces that reward a closer inspection. Among these are Noel McKenna's darkly whimsical picture of two mice in a trap, Barbie Kjar's portrait titled Autumn and a grim, complex picture by Stephen Hall in which the skeleton of an artist lies with his palette in a grave, surrounded by red clouds filled with knights and horsemen. Opposite this is a drawing by Mike Esson, disturbing in a very different way, including some of his familiar hand and anatomical motifs.

These pieces are in the first room, which also contains the winning work, Suzanne Archer's self-portrait in her studio. The picture, called Derangement, is a large and busy composition, full of the stuffed animals that the artist keeps in her studio, and in the centre a disembodied head with mouth wide open in an anguished cry. It is a painful work without being entirely convincing, and it is not at all clear that it was the best choice. Alun Leach-Jones, this year's judge, maintains that "the subject of drawing is drawing itself" - whatever that means - and considers that the present work demonstrates an understanding of this principle.

The next room is filled with abstract drawings that come in two varieties: portentous atmospheric compositions with aspirations to express spiritual insights and obsessive-compulsive pattern-making. Among so much that is rather vacuous, Craig Harrison's Exploring Natural Effects II stands out, at once smaller and far denser than most of its neighbours: 80 tiny oblongs of Delaunay-like variations on lines and curves, all executed in graphite with a strong sense of design and tonal control.

If abstraction is one sterile extreme in drawing, the other is photorealism, represented here by a work by Mark Hislop on the far wall of the final room: a pair of oversized heads seen from behind titled Double Time.

So often with things such as this you wonder why anyone would bother. In contrast, Marco Luccio's series of postcards nearby - in colour this year, unlike the black and white series last time - are full of the artist's irrepressible energy, documents of engagement with the work of earlier artists among which the viewer may find David's Marat and Brack's self-portrait shaving.

Of other works, one could mention Linda Botham's quirky Out of My Mind, Deborah Beck's views of interiors in fish-eye mirrors, Andrew Seward's Seaweed (is this a kind of pun on his name, like a Renaissance emblem?), Mimi Tong's long panorama View of Albany, across many pages of an open book, and Kurt Schranzer's collage Barock Stilleben mit Sturm, in which little bits of incomprehensible machinery become like chessmen on a game board under a sky of geometric diagrams and architectural volutes gone mad.

In the end, two of the more memorable works are Annette Russell's Marking Time, a set of nine charcoal panels based on silhouettes of brushes, bottles and other studio implements profiled against a studio window and the pattern of parallel lines made by its shutters, and Michael Peck's The Land Stood Empty, a series of tiny panels in ink and charcoal, almost abstract if taken singly, yet collectively forming something like a time-lapse sequence of views of a deserted landscape from day to night and day again, in constantly changing weather conditions.

These drawings stand out because they are neither self-referential nor copies of a world pre-processed and flattened by photography but attempt to use the specific qualities of their media to capture some aspect of visual experience and articulate it as a formal idea.

The Dobell Prize for Drawing is at the Art Gallery of NSW until January 30. Admission free.