Drawing with ink takes the precision of a master draftsman and the skill of a watercolorist handling a fluid medium. When I was in school I was completely captivated by the silky dark lines of one of the most famous pen and ink artists, Aubrey Beardsley, but there are several artists working today whose pen and ink drawing work deserves some attention, too.

Daniel Egneus is a Swedish illustrator who works with pen and ink drawing and watercolor. He's had widespread commercial success creating illustrations and designs for Haagen-Dasz, BMW, and Nike, among others, so you may be familiar with his drawings. And if you aren't you'll know them now by the way he contrasts slender line strokes and outlines with voluminous passages of dark ink. His drawings feel more like ink sketches, with marks that are not deliberate and end results that have an ease and flow to them. He's also got a playful side to him, turning a girl's ponytail into a small school of goldfish--and that's the kind of play that opens up one's creative mind.   

Works by Daniel Egneus.

Matt Rota pursues his own fine art drawings while holding down freelance work for a variety of sources including the New York Times Op-Ed page. From images based on current news coverage to more inchoate narratives that lead to expansive ideas as you view them, my mind never shuts off when I look at his ink drawings. I'm always abuzz with ideas or fragmented thoughts, attesting to his strong compositional skills and his way of creating unconventional and sometimes alarming scenes that grab you with a strong image, but never run away with formal concerns. His work could never be described as "art for art's sake." Instead, the artist keeps any purely aesthetic impulse in check to visually whisper in your ear, though never giving away too much.  

Works by Matt Rota.

I think of collapsing worlds and images when I look at the work of Minjae Lee. He's a young South Korean artist who uses color, pattern, and line to create images that read like slick ink paintings that combine fantasy imagery, typography, the human face, and more. His drawings are almost completely ornamental and the height of artifice, but my eye follows each line almost as if I was looking at a landscape painting--that is how engaging each passage of any one of his drawings is.     

Works by Minjae Lee.

P.S. What artists working with pen and ink do you admire? Leave a message and let me know.

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