Drawn to go beyond pen and paper

Four strong Boston-area artists are highlighted in "Material Drawing," an exhibit at the Danforth Museum of Art that relishes all kinds of mark-making beyond that of a stylus. They have been meeting regularly for two years, but unlike many artist groups, they don't assess one another's art. Curator Katherine French quotes one of them, Audrey Goldstein, in the show's catalog: "This is not a crit group. I consider it my drawing group." They get together and talk about ways to draw.

Goldstein, Julia Shepley, Michelle Samour, and Debra Weisberg all clearly love the touch of materials and the sensuality of making art. For them, says French, "drawing erupts out of materials." Those include vellum, thread, brass, wood, and glass. It's a low-key but wonderfully nourishing exhibit because the drawings, like the artists, jump into deep conversation with one another.

Each artist has her own fully developed vision. The works don't borrow from or seep into one another, yet the correspondences are undeniable.

Look at Shepley's whispery "Nightshade Series," in which she layers translucent vellum in lightboxes, and Samour's "Bundle" installation of gouache drawings on translucent handmade paper. In many ways, they're radically different. Samour's brightly toned circles, squiggled with Day-Glo colors, represent individual cells, drifting and clustering across and beyond a wall. Shepley interleaves shadow and light, cutting and painting over the vellum and making staticky sutures across the surface. Yet both artists deploy that translucence; their work seems to capture light and hold it, fluttering, like a moth.

Weisberg builds eddies and explosions out of scraps of black and white tape. Her brawny "Tape Drawing #1" is a spectacular, whirling burst of fragments, concentrated at the center like a clatter of needles.

Like Shepley and Samour, Weisberg makes light a tangible part of her work in the "Glow Drawing" series, which hangs in a closed-off section of the gallery, where you're invited to look at them well lit before you flick off the lights.

Made with luminescent tape and powder, the "Glow Drawings" are smaller than "Tape Drawing #1," and intricately crafted, often setting thrust and momentum against deep space. Turn off the lights, and everything shifts: Black disappears into shadows, white turns to an eerie, luminous green, like stars suspended in the maw of the universe. It's a terrific surprise, and such a simple trick. I clapped my hands in delight like a 3-year-old.

Weisberg's tape drawings, with their layers upon layers of fragments, are not unlike Shepley's nearby tumultuous "Mining the Storm" series, which sports etched glass over gouged, painted plaster. The plaster makes a topography, the glass the weather system through which we view it. Like Weisberg, Shepley works in black and white; her gestures are lush and expressionistic beside Weisberg's staccato splatter.

Then there's Goldstein, who makes the most explicitly conceptual work in the show. She goes to art openings and draws the social networks she finds there, sometimes in knotted wire, or in the case of the "Network Theory" drawings, in oil stick on Mylar. In these, she threads hair-thin lines in black or white over a smoky atmospheric ground; the energy of these febrile lines echoes that of Shepley's "Nightshade" stitches.

Using the "Network Theory" drawings as a starting point, Goldstein then builds tensile little wall sculptures evoking the same networks, in a series called "Point-to-Point." They're Rube Goldberg-style contraptions made up of planes, screens, and joined and jutting wires, some firmly in place, some seeming tenuous indeed.

Samour provides the only color (other than Weisberg's fluorescent green) in the exhibit, and her "Bundle" wall, crawling with cells that may be diseased, is like a bouquet of alien flowers amid the spare, monochrome palettes of the other artists. These extravagant differences, together with the warm connections, make "Material Drawing" a feast.

French has mounted another show in the hallway just outside "Material Drawing" that explicitly ties into that show. Deborah Davidson's "Recent Paintings" exhibit straddles the gulf between text and the artist's lexicon of visual images. She collages cut-out shapes into her painting, then sands them down and builds them up again. The abstract works read almost like music, with each gesture a note against the silence of the background. Sometimes they work into a terrific chatter; sometimes they're more spare, like the chanting of monks. Like the artists in "Material Drawing," her gestures take off from the stuff she works with. You never know where they will go.