Review

"Tom, Millie, Nancy," Mechanical Pencil on Paper.

Michael Smith
On Drawing

10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Frame Gallery
1415 Westport Road
Kansas City, MO
816.756.3341

Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday
Runs through: Feb. 15.

Gallery site: http://www.theframegallery.com

If Michael Smith were to hand-copy this post, it would look something like this ...

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... and that line would be made up of real words.

No kidding. (In fact, one work in Smith's show, On Drawing, is an installation which includes song lyrics written in letters 1/64th of an inch tall.) When Smith wrote down his contact information at the show's opening, it was in letters about as high as a grain of rice is wide.

"It physically pains me to write this large," he said. "If I were to write the way I normally do, this would fit inside the line on the page."

So when Smith, a senior at the Kansas City Art Institute, created the drawings that form the bulk of his show at Frame Gallery, he did so with a .03 mm mechanical pencil ... that he sharpened by rubbing the graphite against a blank note card.

The result: Works of incredible complexity, detail and a neurosurgeon's precision. The online reproduction of Tom, Millie, Nancy, today's featured image, can only suggests the intricacy of Smith's work; it does no justice to the real thing.

Call it a quirk if you like. The simple fact is that Smith likes to write small (see above), draw small (He once followed a model around his drawing class for hours so he could get her knee — and only her knee — just right.) and write small stories. In addition to his visual art, Smith is the author of All's Well That Ends, a collection of microfiction featuring his alter ego, Robert.

An example:

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Robert's marriage explained through a metaphor using a transit system

Robert's wife held a guilty sort of hate for him. She was disgusted with him, annoyed at every movement and word, but could not understand or grant herself permission to have her relentless feelings of agitation and so she stifled herself into a co-dependent martyrdom and stayed with him. She was given to introverted musing and often fantasized various escapes from her husband's sour mouth and pathetic nature. Within the most persistent and repetitive fantasy she placed herself into the role of an airplane. Her engines (for a reason outside of her control (therefore making it impossible to make her carry the blame.)) would sputter and die. Thinking about falling through all the nothing of the sky was what made this course of thought so important to her.

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Enigmatic? Yes. Fascinating? Also, yes. Smith's statement (of which the following is only an excerpt) offers more of the same, by way of explaining how a drawing takes shape:

An extended period of self induced focus and deprivation causes a small written work. The written work becomes the point of fixation. The fixation of the written work is dissolved through drawing. The drawing is stared at until it disappears, and the disappearing adds another written work. In a logical creative practice the maker finds interest, treats that interest well until it appears that it is time to move, and then does. This work ignores stair step thinking. A single point or detail is funneled through an act that dissolves it. The point isn't fighting for a predetermined outcome. The reason for all this focus is that the object of it isn't answerable. The point is to take observation and push it past a normal limit to a place it isn't supposed to be.

Isn't supposed to be? One could take exception to that statement. After viewing the works in On Drawing, it would be hard to argue that Smith's talent, vision and skills have met at just the right place.

Not to put too fine a point on it, of course ...

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