Raymond Saunders’s drawings, especially those from the 1970s, are highly accomplished, tour de force graphic expressions in the tradition of Cy Twombly, Jim Dine, and other linearly oriented artists of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Often combining delicate pencil traceries, handcrafted patterns, calculated scribbles, insets of prismatic colors adjacent to intermittent blank areas, cut-and-pasted papers, and stenciled and stamped symbols and numerals, these drawings revel in a free-form impulsiveness unencumbered by modern art conventions or expectations. What distinguishes this Bay area artist’s methodology and production from those of other expressionist painters is a purposeful yet almost cursory approach to design and color in tandem with an instinctive, improvisatory tendency and a playful attitude toward the drafted, sketched, and portrayed. The result is an almost guileless art whose subjects—anecdotal, popular, and autobiographical—fuel Saunders’s distinctive, wholly original approach to post-Pop art-making. Works such as Light Up reconcile masterful yet psychologically unfurled drawing with astute color applications veering toward the neon and radiant, an aesthetic squaring-off in which Saunders’s promulgation of mark-making in crayon and pencil vociferously challenges the minor status of drawing in art world hierarchies.
“Raymond Saunders” and “Hervé Télémaque,” in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, eds., Darby English and Charlotte Barat (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2019), 304-305, 418-419.
