Tumult captured on paper

Dobell Drawing Prize: Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until January 31.

Dobell Drawing Prize: Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until January 31.

THIS year's Dobell Drawing Prize exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW is one of the best I've seen. The work is well chosen and well displayed, and although there are inevitably a few of the usual suspects, there are also plenty of things worth looking at.

Drawing shows always raise questions about the definition of the category and specifically of the boundary between drawing and painting. That borderline can never be firm, and cannot be determined on the basis of media or materials alone. On the other hand, we all sense a fully worked-up picture is no longer a drawing.

A drawing may be anything from a sketch to a large-scale, elaborate composition, but it has to retain something of a sense of openness, process or discovery; something provisional and mobile. The difficulty for artists who choose the large-scale finished drawing as their vehicle is achieving substance without falling into an overworked leadenness.

This year's winner, Pam Hallandal, manages to preserve that sense of animation and spontaneity even in a relatively finished and designed composition. Her circular drawing evokes the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, figures and boats driven in a whirl around a still centre.

Movement is important here, as is the human figure, whose simplified forms help to suggest the urgency of actions glimpsed momentarily.

Most of the figures are very small, but the woman in a boat at the lower right and the fleeing girl to her left are large enough to personalise the drama and to cue us to read the remaining figures in a similar way.

Discreet hints of colour, blues and ochres, animate and differentiate areas of the composition.

Among other larger compositions, Robyn Yeoman, who also stood out last year, has a big charcoal study of a rural shed crowded and cluttered with drums, an anvil, old tyres and chains.

It is a deliberately complex subject, which Yeoman has impressively mastered, subordinating the parts to the whole and controlling the tonal unity of the composition.

Also striking, although very different in style and sensibility, is Rod Holdaway's fluid, fish-eye lens view of Sydney's Enmore Road in the morning; here there is no tone and Holdaway achieves compositional unity with the disconcerting illusion that the whole thing is done in a single continuous line of charcoal.

Landscape is the most prominent genre this year, and there are works by Suzanne Archer, Tim Allen and Daniel Pata that all deserve attention.

Next to them again is a fine series of pencil and pastel drawings by Belinda Ward, Morning in the Park, and a bewitching phantasmagoria of rocks and trees by Robyn Mayo.

Last year I observed that media were not listed on the labels. This year that has been remedied, and it is a great help in appreciating the works.

It is particularly useful for casual visitors, who may assume that drawing is always done with pencils, but even for very experienced viewers it is good to know that something involves both charcoal and chalk (or black Conte crayon), that it uses ink or watercolour and so forth. In fact the variety of media, from traditional chalks and inks to ballpoint and felt-tipped pens is impressive.

It reminds us that the art of drawing is alive and well, and that artists are willing to search through its history to find the media best suited to their purposes.

Particularly appealing this year are several suites of small drawings. Among the larger landscapes are a pair of little concertina sketchbooks opened out in a glass case. Both have chosen to use the opportunity given by these books to produce long continuous images. Deborah Kay's Reflections on Floodwater is in watercolour and other coloured media, while in contrast Brigiat Maltese's Secret life of Weeds is a long luxuriance of plant forms drawn in pen and ink.

Rita Lazauskas displays a set of the same concertina sketchbooks, but devotes each page to a separate monochrome image in charcoal and Conte crayon on gesso: tiny pictures drawn from children's toys, trashily coloured in reality but abstracted into what look at a casual glance like lay-figures, and evoking hundreds of micro-narratives.

Even more intriguing is a collection of ink sketches done on the backs of old postcards by Marco Luccio, best known as a printmaker. The postcards evoke the idea of travel, and these sketches were indeed made on an overseas trip, from works of art in great museums. We recognise figures from Matisse, Picasso and Egon Schiele, as well as Greek and Roman sculptures. The suite is a reflection on Luccio's dialogue with his forebears, ancient and modern, but it also, and almost inadvertently, reminds us forcibly of the intense and renewed dialogue of the modernists themselves with classical models.