Exhibition

Drawing served many purposes for Craig Kauffman; he used it throughout his five decades-long career. In the early 1950s, drawings were related to his small abstract paintings, and the use of a free-floating line was common to both. By the middle 1960s, Kauffman kept spiral-bound notebooks of drawings, in which he worked through a progression of shapes, some biomorphic abstractions which became increasingly simplified. The drawings eventually grew in size, and established the basis for his first works on plastic.

Later in his career, Kauffman was honored with a 2008 drawing retrospective organized by the late Jay Belloli, accompanied by a catalogue, at the Armory Center for  Arts. In the catalogue essay, Belloli wrote:

"Craig Kauffman's drawings are remarkable not only because of their importance throughout his career, but also because of how diverse they are. Kauffman has talked about how his artistic development never has progressed in a straight line. He moves from one formal approach, medium or theme to another, and back again. Since his experience as a student at UCLA he has been involved with Japanese Art, even architecture--going so far as to express the Zen idea of the void in both drawing and in three-dimensional works in plastic. But his interests in the materiality and imagery of Western art always returns, and he re-explores them again and again."

quoted from: Belloli, Jay. Craig Kauffman: A Retrospective of Drawings. Pasadena: Armory Center for the Arts, 2008. Exhibition catalogue.