Darkness Like a Dream: Nineteenth-Century Sandpaper Drawings

Darkness Like a Dream featured the nineteenth-century art form of "sandpaper painting," which employed neither sandpaper nor the techniques of painting. Rather, a sandpaper painting is a drawing in charcoal (sometimes pastel) on a board prepared with a coating of marble dust, the texture of which readily received the artist's marks, sparkled when held to the light, and allowed for a range of light and dark effects similar to those found in engravings. Nineteenth-century artists often referred to the technique as "monochromatic painting," in part to highlight its original emphasis on the single color black. In addition, the association with painting, rather than drawing, gave the finished product an elevated status.

Introduced to the United States in 1835, sandpapers became hugely popular with both trained and untrained artists in the 1850s and 1860s. Although thousands of the drawings were created during this period, the sandpaper medium has been largely overlooked in the study of American folk art. This exhibition presented examples of the art form from the collections of Randall and Tanya Holton, and Matt Mullican and Valerie Smith.

Nocturnal scenes, landscapes, and historical depictions were favorite subjects of sandpaper artists. Virtually all of the drawings, including most of the works shown here, were based on prints that appeared in monthly magazines, volumes of poetry, and travelogues, among other publications. While artists took their initial inspiration from prints, they did not merely copy them. Several of the drawings in this exhibition share the same subject, but the individual renderings vary greatly and represent each artist's distinctive adaptation of the original source.

This text is based on the research and adapted from the writings of Randall and Tanya Holton, who at the time of this exhibition were  writing a book on the history of sandpapers.