Drawing was a major part of Sonia Gechtoff’s studio practice throughout her seven-decade career, whether on paper or over acrylic paint, either on paper or canvas. John Yau practically credits Gechtoff with inventing this novel way of modeling the surfaces of her acrylic paintings by using pencil and graphite¹. This practice began in the mid-1960s with paper overpainted with acrylic medium and pigment, as opposed to using tinted papers, and became a major part of each series and most paintings through the 1970s and continued throughout the remainder of her career.  

Gechtoff’s drawings on paper were conceived as stand-alone artworks in and of themselves, not a sketch or study for a painting. Each drawing was intended to be a unique work of art, often as part of a series of 3 to 5 works, sometimes more, as she worked through permutations to resolve an aesthetic concept or specific imagery.

The meticulous detail and precision of Gechtoff’s individual, intentional strokes with the pencil produced modeled shapes and forms of the same subject matter found in her paintings. In many of her drawings, especially those from the 1950s and 60s, the strokes of graphite were every bit as powerful and bold as her legendary forceful wielding of the palette knife to lay down large swaths of oil paint on the surface of heroic scaled canvases. The forceful and long metered strokes of graphite in her drawings produced compositions full of strong contrasts of light and dark passages that evoked depth, motion, and energy across the paper support that rivaled any painting. Gechtoff’s drawings often paralleled major series of paintings that were frequently in process as she used both mediums to explore a series of subjects simultaneously, such as: gardens, architectural structures, rippling streamers, waves of water, turbulent winds, bird’s wings, billowing smoke, flames, and celestial bodies. Collectively, the drawings were a major percentage of Gechtoff’s artistic output each decade and an in-depth collection of her artworks would not be complete without drawings on paper.