In a retrospective, sketches and studies are typically destined for vitrines in which a few highlighted drawings are displayed beneath glass. However, in Drawings: 1996–2023, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Jay Isaac, preparatory drawings alongside a small suite of finished works become the retrospective’s focus. Based in Rowley, New Brunswick, Isaac was awarded a New Brunswick Arts Board grant in 2024 to digitally archive his drawings, which prompted an exhibition of this scope. Fittingly, Isaac’s retrospective resembles an archive of ideas rather than a collection of completed works and delivers sharp insight into his creative process, especially for those familiar with the artist’s oeuvre.

Isaac’s exhibition comprises 99 small-scale drawings, most around 8 1/2” x 11” or “letter” size. They are unframed and pinned to the wall with some older pieces yellowing from age, lending the installation a rough, raw immediacy matching a drawing style that eschews a formalist stress of technique, accuracy, and completion. The artist’s chosen media, including black marker, often lacks preciousness, too. Installation-wise, the drawings are loosely classified chronologically but also arranged according to series and, at times, the location of creation.

Most drawings have been studies for a previously established series; consequently, the artist refers to them as “templates.” The exception is a 2018 series of black-and-white figurative drawings for a limited-edition book titled Like a Baby I Was Born Again, which are finished works in themselves. Other drawings are preliminary studies for series, including Mural Studies (2021), Neutralizer Suite (2022), Log Pile Variations (2022), and Pitch Assembling (2023). Nevertheless, the drawings’ nervous spontaneity, along with their surrealistic imagery and quirky humour, grant them significant value not just as an archive of concepts but as standalones.

Chronologically, the exhibition begins with work dating back to Isaac’s studies at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Including student work was risky, potentially resulting in over-inclusion and undeveloped artwork, but this retrospective overcomes that challenge. His early drawings are notable for introducing what would become established concepts, approaches, and motifs. Despite the considerable variance among these early works–an abstracted still life sketch (Untitled, 1998) versus a cartoon-like drawing of an unrealistically curved nail penetrating three tiny, equally unrealistic, very pliable boards (Untitled, 1996)–they stand in as prescient experiments resulting in lasting paradigms and thus as testimony to the work’s maturity. The still lives mixed with other genres in the former indicate the still life–landscape mergers in Isaac’s Hinterland (2001) series. The surrealistic approach of odd pairings of incompatible images and objects in the latter piece persists, including in the artist’s current work. Such juxtapositions make Isaac’s drawings jarringly memorable, revealing him as a skilled, versatile imagist whose work, especially his most recent, displays a cryptic Surrealist incompatibility reminiscent of that movement’s Exquisite Corpse game.

Take, for instance, Untitled (1998), in which Isaac pairs a carefully composed drawing of a leaf, depicted more like a still-life object than a falling leaf, with an abstracted landscape resembling a pond with a mountain in the background. A phallic fountain spills water from the pond or lake. Similarly, other works juxtapose tangible objects and natural imagery, such as trees, against sculptural and totemic forms.

Isaac’s drawing from the aughts, notably works from when he resided in New Brunswick between 2006 and 2008, are more painterly and formally rendered than his student studies or his recent work. They tend to be either abstract or representational, rather than a mix of the two. For example, Untitled (2006), a Matisse-like series of planes of flat colour with small bands of encircling white lines, reveals what vaguely represents a small lake or pond with trees and a starry sky. The white line is suggestive of later work, such as studies for the Pitch Assembling series (2023), in which colour is filled-in inside lines, like a comic book, emphasizing the linear. These elements are representative of the significance of cartooning and graphics to his work, especially this last decade.

This graphic approach is evident throughout the Pitch Assembling series, the title of which alludes to Betram Brooker’s iconic painting Sounds Assembling (1928). Connections among Isaac’s drawings include repeated motifs, with the surrealistic transformation of objects as a key paradigm that appears from time to time, including in the Pitch Assembling series, such as in Untitled (2023), composed of a highway morphing into a tree.

People are also transformed, and often with humor, such as in Study for “Mural Study 1” (2020), a loose, rapidly drawn black marker outline of an androgynous figure with their head replaced with a landline phone, which they talk into. Another drawing, Untitled (2021), recalls Michael Snow’s iconic Walking Woman series; however, the figure walks from one persona into another as if striding into more professional attire. These recent drawings and the figurative works from Like a Baby I Was Born Again (2018) take a quick, gestural, even deskilled approach to cartooning and graphics.

Isaac’s figures can be machine-like, as in Mural Study for the Future Site of an Artist Union (2020), a black-and-white drawing in which a line of male figures are moved like puppets or windup toys by disproportionately large hands operating levers on unseen assembly line machines with no clear purpose.

The drawings may also present allusions. For instance, the Pitch Assembling series drawings include a repeated walking figure burdened by the heavy packs he carries. This figure is central to this series’ exploration of the transient New Brunswick salespeople of Lebanese descent. The studies’ simplicity and repeated forms allow viewers to see such underlying references with clarity.

Jay Isaac’s archival drawing exhibition serves as both an accompaniment to the finished series of the last several decades and an autonomous retrospective. The included rapid sketches highlight specific aspects of his work with their graphic quality and often humorous surreal elements. As well as building linear, chronological connections, or direct chains of influence, this exhibition offers rhizomic relationships transcending timelines, linking in multiple, nonlinear directions. Jay Isaac takes us on a wanderlust journey through the ideation of three decades of work that is not unlike the paths the travelling salespeople took in Pitch Assembling.

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Drawings: 1996–2023 by Jay Isaac was exhibited at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, in Toronto, 4 April – 10 May, 2025.

All photographs by LF Documentation, courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.