The Viewing Room

My drawing, Float, is currently on display at the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI, as part of the exhibition Drawn to Collect: Selections from the Farrell-Herrick Collection of Drawings. [May 13-August 2023]. And It has a place of honor by being exhibited on its own wall in an exhibition where other drawings are hung in salon style.

This exhibition highlights selections from Detroit-based collectors Michael Farrell and Marc Herrick. Collecting together for 20 years, and individually before then, the two have amassed an evergrowing assemblage of artworks across an array of mediums, including paintings, drawings, prints, glass, ceramics, and silver. The artworks included in this exhibition, just a portion of their collection, reveals the pair's interest in the intimate and personal aspect of drawings. Drawn to Collect includes preliminary sketches, landscapes, portraits, and narrative scenes from the Farrell-Herrick collection by artists including Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, John Koch, and more.

For years the characters inhabiting David Bailin's drawings persevered no matter how absurd that perseverance was – a hapless but heroic Buster Keaton inhabiting a Kafkaesque world. The drawings focused on that figure as he (it was always he) did battle with some crisis of minutia or conundrum.

But, for Bailin, this self-contained and claustrophobic world began to feel too comfortable in a time of plague and politics. The anger, frustration and fear that seemed so removed from the earlier work took over. At first, it was a single running figure, camouflaged within a pointillist landscape that eventually morphed into the crowd of frenetic men searching for, lashing out against, or threatened by something unseen or unstated that may lay hidden nearby.

With the Gatherings series, his attention turns to the crowd. As with any fomented group, what threatens them is rarely real, but, unfortunately, it is they who will haunt our dreams.