Presenting a diverse range of media and techniques, On Your Mark continues our exploration of the artist’s impulse and compulsion for drawing. Our primary interest has been to engage collectors and patrons with a deeper look at the artist’s process and to expand this conversation through process- oriented exhibitions, interactive gallery talks, artist studio tours, and Art-E, an educational program for children and adults.

With very different intents and results, Marlene Vine and Gwyneth Leech approach drawing as a dialogue between mark making and the surface, beginning with an initial response to the first touch of ink, graphite or paint. Obsessively building, layering and obliterating through memory, observation and working from within, the images take on a life of their own. Guided by the process of liftng and lowering pen and fluid acrylic, Marlene Vine saturates her two-dimensional paper with dense layers of tonalities within a tight, confined space. Shaped by Vine’s movements and energy, each unique, organic abstract composition emerges from an intricate web of varied and repetitious lines that flow, form, cover and reveal. Drawing the viewer into unanticipated meditative, explosive, and emotional images informed by a single primary mark, Vine also invites a journey into the physicality of her process.

Before applying a systemic painting process, Rebecca Riley uses drawing as a bridge to connect the lines of rivers and streams from random pieces of maps. Her organic composite compositions form templates to create new worlds, each a kind of living organism, its growth directed, misdirected, and sometimes out of the control of its human inhabitants. An extension of Riley’s fascination with the systems, structures and patterning found in molecular and cellular levels, the initial act of drawing strengthens the relationship between parts and how the interaction of these parts affect the system’s growth.

Originating with the expressive sweep of calligraphic strokes, Wei Jia’s work is inspired by traditional Chinese characters and poetry, as well as by western artists such as Cy Twombly and Mark Rothko. While traditional calligraphy is brushed onto the surface of paper or silk, Wei Jia applies numerous tactile layers of Xuan paper onto canvas as if it were pigment. Often ripped to produce texture and ambiguity of association, the strokes have recently become looser and more abstracted, melting into marks and layers as landscape on canvas that let the viewer’s eyes travel with their own journey. By rendering the characters void of literary context, he explores the abstract beauty of its shapes, curves and the varied velocities of stroke by a particular master’s hand, while offering the universal cross- cultural experience of how one perceives an unfamiliar language. In this series produced at his Beijing studio, Wei Jia explores traditional Chinese poetry and sensation toward nature and his everyday life.

Annysa Ng’s intricate ink drawings of Elizabethan collars are rendered in such a precise, obsessive way, that one can feel its chokehold, yet the dots she uses to form the collar are extremely subtle and delicate. Clothed in combinations of European and traditional Chinese costumes, Ng’s flat, featureless silhouetted female faces devoid of emotion and character are not cross cultural, but reference the history of female suppression in Hong Kong, as well as the paradox of constructing a hollow identity through outer embellishment and status.

Drawing with touch, rather than with ink or graphite, Lin Yan’s recent work includes casting Xuan paper fibers into increasingly more sculptural reliefs with figurative spiritual imagery from folk art and industrial elements that reference inner and outer worlds. Freeing herself from all convention, Lin Yan continues to layer and make use of Xuan paper’s contrasting qualities of delicacy and strength, translucence and opacity and its broad range of absorbency. A response to recent man-made disasters that destroy not only the natural world, but also humanity, this new series of flowing, cloth-like compositions breaks with the geometric structures usually associated with many of the cast architectural forms. Minimalist emotional fragments of everyday life combine urban materials with organic cycles that speak to the continuing struggle between nature and global industrialism.

Exhibited nationally and internationally, these award-winning artists’ works have been acquired by numerous prominent public and private collectors. Selected public collections, exhibitions and awards include:

Marlene Vine:

Collections: Pollock Gallery; Dallas, TX; Deloitte & Touche, Dallas, TX; King & Spalding Inc., NYC; York Cambridge Laboratory Consultants, Weston, MA; Islip Art Museum, Islip, NY;

Exhibitions: OK Harris Gallery, NYC; Islip Art Museum, Islip, NY; New York University Gallery, NYC; Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, NYC; The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; New York Drawers: Pierogi Flat Files, Gasworks, London, England, and Cornerhouse, Gallery, Manchester, England; The City College of New York, CUNY, NYC, and Centro Cultural Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina (catalog); Chapelle de la Sorbonne, Paris, France, and Musee de la Commanderie, Bordeaux, France; Cie Moderne et Contemporaine, Paris, France. Awards: 2009 Pollock-Krasner Award, NYC. Born and educated in the United States.

Annysa Ng:

Collections: Georg v. Holzbrinck GmbH & Co.KG, Stuttgart, Germany and the Stadtbuecherie Stuttgart City Library, Germany.

Exhibitions: Osaka Municipal Arts Museum, Japan; Tottori Municipal Arts Museum, Japan; Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart, Germany; Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong; Petronas Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Baptist University, Hong Kong; S.Z. International Exlibris Show, Shenzhen, China; Juldis Hatyai Plaza, and Hatyai, Songkhla, Thailand; SCOPE Basel International Contemporary Art Fair, Switzerland; National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York, NY; China Art Gallery, Beijing, China.

Awards: Japan’s 1996 Osaka Governor Prize; 2009/10 Urban Artists Initiative Fellowship, NYC. Born in Hong Kong, educated in the United States and Germany.

Rebecca Riley:

Collections: Agnes Gund.

Exhibitions: 2008 Project Globe, Art Auction for Future Generations, sponsored by Travel and Leisure Magazine; Cartographic Cells at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY; 75 Mile Radius at Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, NYC; The 92nd Street Y, NYC; Herter Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; University Place Gallery, Cambridge, MA; Valdosta State University, Valdosta, GA; Montgomery College, Rockville, MD; Jonathan Shorr Gallery, NYC; Flushing Town Hall, Smithsonian Affiliate, Flushing, NY; ArtHamptons International Fine Arts Fair, Bridgehampton, NY. Images published on the cover of the March 2007 issue of the Journal of the Complexity Society, Emergence: Complexity and Organization; May 2005 issue of Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA, Geometric Evolution Equations. Born in the United States, educated in the United States and Italy.

Wei Jia:

Exhibitions: University of Colorado Art Museum, CO; National Museum of Art, Beijing, Binghamton University Art Museum, NY; Art Complex Museum, MA; Kean University, NJ; China 2000 Contemporary Art, NY; The Cork Gallery, Avery Fisher Hall, NY; Center Gallery, Bucknell University, PA; The Chinese Cultural Institute, Boston, MA; The Parker House Museum, PA; Museum of Chinese History, Beijing. Born in China, educated in Beijing and the United States.

Lin Yan:

Collections: National Art Gallery of China, Beijing; Pang Xunqin Museum, Changshu; Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum; Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Deutsche Bank. Exhibitions: University of Colorado Art Museum, CO; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Dresden State Art Collections, Germany; Museum of Chinese in America, NY, He Xiang-ning Museum in China; Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum in China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; Wave Hill, Bronx, NY. Born in China into a prominent lineage of Chinese artists, educated in Beijing, Paris and the United States