Drawing on new technology

The seeds of artists' work show up in their sketchbooks. Notebooks can reveal how ideas are fleshed out. Printmaker Peter Scott uses his sketchbooks not just as a test run for his ideas, but as the source material itself. In his show at Gallery NAGA, he scans pages from his books into digital prints.

The result is often a bit of a cheat. It's also still intriguing. Part of that is the illicit thrill of looking in someone's private notebooks.

Yet Scott elevates process over content, which in turn heightens the viewer's awareness of the act of looking itself.

He does this sometimes by drawing over the scans of his own sketches. In many cases, we see not just the drawing, but the book itself resting on the flatbed scanner. That is, we don't get as caught up in the sunny window scene "Sketchbook: At Marie's" because we see it's in a book.

It seems unlikely that the gallery would have agreed to show the drawings straight, though. They're good sketches, but they needed this conceptual twist to make them art.

When it comes to the works scanned straight from the notebooks with no elaboration , such as "Sketchbook: At Marie's," I would rather have seen the drawings themselves. Scott has added to others. "Sketchbook: Stool" started out as just a stool; the artist has added spring-green grass and ribbony ferns. In "Sketchbook: Veranda, White River , " he scanned three drawings side by side, making a panorama that mixes styles and palettes. Works such as these, which require more thinking and action than merely placing a book on a scanner, are the most engaging.

Also at NAGA, Robert Siegelman offers several photo montages. Siegelman used to shoot with a large-scale Polaroid; now he's prowling museums and homes with a digital camera. His topic hasn't changed: desire and yearning. The results -- especially the works featuring men -- aren't steamy so much as lonely and full of heartache, and teenage romanticism.

Those that incorporate works of art are subtler and more powerful. "Untitled (5-31-05)" couples an unidentified marble statue of a boy Siegelman shot at the Museum of Fine Arts with a detail from John Singleton Copley's canvas "Watson and The Shark." It's a close-up of the young man in the water; either he's about to be pulled to safety or devoured by the shark, and fear mixes with surrender in his wide eyes.

Together, these images capture the allure and danger of adolescence; the statue is innocence and the painting represents its loss.

Most artists use erasers to erase. Reanne Estrada draws on them. Her eraser drawings -- which she characterizes as either high-relief drawings or low-relief sculptures -- are up at OH+T Gallery, and they're more than a clever conceit. Estrada draws with ink on geometric constructions of colored erasers.

The work is small-scaled and intimate; she pulls you in with her tiny abstract drawings. "Koh-I-Noor" is a dazzling little piece on yellow erasers, with flames and clouds of color exploding over the surface, which dimples in at the center where the circular edges of the erasers curve. These pieces are good but feel tentative, like the first stabs at a form that could lead to something much more ambitious.

"The Marriage of Reason," a series of collaborative prints by Gregg Blasdel and Jennifer Koch, who are married, features bold abstracts, each sporting two forms in dialogue. Trying to guess which artist made which form is half the fun. "Sugar Spoon" shows a masculine torso shape coursing with a river of woodgrain (Blasdel's handiwork, according to OH+T's Caroline Taggart ), paired with a silver chain of boxes (Koch's). The organic torso sets up an interesting tension with the geometric chain, but in most of these prints, the interchange is a little too even-handed; I'd like to see more conflict. After all, what marriage is truly based on reason?

Three relatively untried artists explore the potential of fragmentation in a group show at Locco Ritoro. Kylliki Talp paints in acrylic on a smooth surface, then peels the painting off and slices it into little splinters, which she reassembles atop another painting. Sometimes -- as in the thrilling "Deserted City" -- this leads to a sprightly two-step of foreground and background, in which you're never sure which is leading. It's more effective in landscapes than portraits (her portraits lean toward the saccharine, anyway).

Scott Chasse heightens the mediation of black-and-white photography by painting from news photos, breaking the image up even more by removing the shades of gray. His paintings of cheerleaders are blotted on in heavy black dots over pale monochromatic grounds. It's a terrifically stark representation of a colorful subject.

Laurie Carman's fragments are the pinpoints of needles projecting from wood panels. Her best works have the silver needles starlighting against black panels in organic designs. Another series, in which she weaves black thread in parabolic patterns around her needles, is uninspiring; it reminded me of a project I did in seventh-grade art class.