Sketch Artists: A Guide Through Our Fourth Adult Contemporary Exhibition

The initial idea for Drawers, the fourth installment of the Scene’s Adult Contemporary series of art exhibitions, wasn’t remarkably deep: a show of provocative art that is limited to drawings. But not long after I began formalizing more of those ideas, I realized that drawing and intimacy are much more closely associated than I’d first thought. There’s a personal, secretive element to many of the drawings — several of the works come directly from artists’ sketchbooks, and others feel like they’re capturing a private idea.

There’s also an immediacy to a drawing that can tap into something primal about art-making. A handful of the Drawers artists work with live models, and the tension between the artist and subject translates into the work they’ve created together. Finally, there’s an approachable, attainable quality to drawing — it’s practically the girl next door of artistic mediums. Even the most skillfully rendered work can seem within reach simply because you’ve likely held the same type of pen in your own hand, smudged the same line, or smelled the same pencil shavings. And in keeping with that line of thinking, maybe you’ve also had the same thoughts.

Among the most diaristic works in Drawers is an actual diary. Nashville-based artist Sai Clayton kept a COVID journal in the first months of the pandemic, and it’s littered with sexual fantasies and a running list of COVID case counts — a combination that feels unique to that time, like toggling between CNN and PornHub.

New York-based self-taught artist Sal Salandra — whose provocative thread works were a highlight of the Adult Contemporary show Shag in 2020 — has a pair of sketches that highlight his fanciful, imaginative, joyful views around sex. In “Angels Do It,” a crew of cherubs watch from atop clouds as one of their kind — an angel in Western wear with a halo floating above his cowboy hat — has sex with a mortal. 

Another self-taught outsider artist, Thornton Dial is well-known in Nashville, mainly for the Frist Art Museum’s 2012 Creation Story exhibit, which paired the Alabama-born artist’s Rauschenbergian assemblages with works by the quilters of Gee’s Bend. “Road to the Mountaintop,” a public sculpture by Dial, was commissioned by Metro Arts in 2013. Supporters who are less familiar with Dial’s erotic drawings may be surprised to see how freely the artist incorporates vulvae and rambunctious sexuality into his folk-art oeuvre. 

In many ways, the anchor of Drawers is a trio of drawings by Betty Tompkins. The drawings are from her ongoing Fuck Grid series, and show the artist’s mastery over the photorealistic sex acts she’s been making since the late 1960s. Tompkins is best known for large-scale paintings based on sex and pornography, and although the drawings in Drawers are small by comparison at 17 by 14 inches, their hyper-specific zoomed-in portrayal of sexual penetration remains monumentally bold.

Clarity Haynes is a New York-based artist whose crowning series features the same tightly cropped perspectives and photorealistic detail as Tompkins’ works, but Haynes’ vaginas are mid-birth instead of mid-coitus. The portrait-like studies are sweetly reverent — she treats her subjects with a softer, more romantic point of view than you might expect. 

Among the Drawers artists whose works involve primal and unexpected source material is Chicago-based duo Ryan M. Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz, whose collaborative practice incorporates elements of classical art and Paleolithic cave paintings, and New York-based artist Perrin R. Ireland, whose scientifically researched renderings of animals include female bonobos having sex in a pond and male boto dolphins engaging in foreplay.

Ozu, who uses a pseudonym, had their work confiscated by a post office in India. “Dream of an Ornithologist” was among the drawings that were en route to Nashville, but were returned to sender along with a note expressing shock over the content of the drawings. With the artist’s permission, a high-resolution copy of the drawing was printed in Nashville — its depiction of a nude woman being caressed by a swan with a human hand in place of its head is dreamy erotic fantasy at its finest.

Nashville-based artist Paul Collins made several new drawings specifically for Drawers. The resulting ink-on-paper works show a raw, energized vision of sexuality — one work, called “Embrace,” shows a man masturbating, his penis multiplied into several versions of itself like the rhinoceros shaking its head in the caves at Chauvet. In “Shelter,” a woman’s pendulous breast acts like a support beam, buttressing her entire body above a small man who seems lost in shadow. 

Other Nashville-based artists who have made sex-forward work specifically for Drawers include XPayne, Julia Martin, Brett Douglas Hunter, Brady Haston and Kevin Guthrie, whose renderings of erotic film posters on the backs of cardboard beer boxes include the original Swedish release poster for Vilgot Sjöman’s 1967 classic I Am Curious (Yellow). 

The purpose of the Adult Contemporary exhibits is to normalize discussions around sex and sexuality through contemporary art, and the breadth of work in Drawers — both the quantity of artists involved and the diversity in their subjects — shows that these conversations are as valuable and relevant as ever.