Margaret Davidson: Leading with Drawing, offers a double take on drawing, by featuring a selection of the artist’s works in conversation with drawings from the museum Permanent Collection, specially hand-picked by Davidson herself. Many of these pieces have never been seen before.

Margaret Davidson: Leading with Drawing speaks of the unparalleled surge that drawing as an art form has been experiencing in the art world. Passé notions that once relegated drawing as being a preparatory stage for painting or sculpture have long since been cast aside. Drawing is an intense, sensitive, compelling, personal, and utterly direct art form, today no longer governed by any particular imagery but encompassing a variety of approaches, including realism and abstraction.

Over the past three decades, artist Margaret Davidson has focused her drawing practice on the intriguing relationship between reality and illusion: the reality of the pencil marks and surface of choice—paper, but also natural things such as sticks and dried leaves—and the illusion of three dimensional objects she masterfully creates. As an example, her uncanny drawings of buttons are convincing illusions of buttons, and the artist likes to contrast this illusion with the texture of the surface they are drawn on, or the actual graphite or ink marks they are drawn with, in a search for that revelatory moment when both illusion and reality are disclosed to the eye and the mind at the same time. 

Always meticulously ambitious in scope and astonishing in execution, whether buttons, pebbles, grains of sand, skeins of wool, or newspapers arranged in spiraling forms, Davidson’s drawings reflect the artist’s fascination for an ancient design symbol known as the ‘circle-dot’. This symbol has been found all over the world, and has been used as a design element in every society and civilization. As in a mantra—that is a sound repeated over and over to aid concentration in meditation—Davidson often covers the whole surface by repeating the same form. And as in meditation practice, she believes this creates a pathway into deeper and deeper awareness, allowing the mind to soar to universal heights. 

Margaret Davidson has a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the University of Washington. Until her retirement in 2014, she has taught courses in Beginning Drawing, Sources of Modernism in Drawing, Aesthetics of Drawing, and various drawing technique classes at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, Washington.

View the Gallery Guide: online version or print version.

Margaret Davidson, “Indian Corn,” n.d, Colored pencil on paper

Margaret Davidson

Margaret Davidson has a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the University of Washington. She is both an artist and illustrator and, until retirement in 2014, taught courses in Beginning Drawing, Sources of Modernism in Drawing, Aesthetics of Drawing, and various drawing technique classes at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, Washington.

In her drawings, Davidson focuses on a realistic depiction of the very ordinary and the discoveries of unique singularity to be found there.

Davidson is the author of Contemporary Drawing: Key Concepts and Techniques, published in 2011 by Watson-Guptill, a division of Random House, New York.

Photo credit: Maralyn Crosetto