The presence of love in a work of art shouldn’t be a primary gauge of its merit. If it were, the world would be overrun by masterpieces—or depleted of them, depending on how you looked at it. Love and artistic necessity don’t always go hand in hand. Take Matisse, for example. Love doesn’t exactly radiate from his paintings. His hedonism was inextricable from his mercilessness. As far as aesthetic judgments go, we have to ask (with Tina Turner): What’s love got to do with it?

Having said that, Eric Holzman’s drawings, the subject of an exhibition at the New York Studio School, are palpably suffused with love. There’s no missing it: The pieces, typically done in watercolor and egg tempera with occasional traces of pastel, charcoal and graphite, exude a quiet passion. For Mr. Holzman, making art is an endeavor through which intimacy and longing achieve a finely tuned, if tenuous, resolution.

All of which wouldn’t matter a whit if he weren’t in command of his medium and alert to all of its possibilities. For Mr. Holzman, the making of art is about pleasure, not catharsis, though it remains an enterprise that demands a sense of responsibility. He doesn’t favor expressive need over aesthetics—from the evidence on hand, the idea never occurs to him. Mr. Holzman isn’t indulgent: Love is both tempered and intensified by his touch.

He’s an ambitious artist, but he’s levelheaded and takes nothing for granted, including the weight of history. The clarity and quietude of Renaissance art; the discipline and effortlessness of Chinese landscape and Japanese scroll painting; Cézanne’s profound

uncertainty—Mr. Holzman taps into them all. He’s fully aware that mere reiteration is a slacker’s game, but he’s modest enough to understand how daunting a proposition artistic renewal can be. There’s nothing grandiose in his objectives.

Mr. Holzman begins each drawing by creating a weathered, fresco-like field. “Most drawings I love,” he says, “look like they’re on paper that’s a thousand years old.” Citing Michelangelo’s drawings as a pivotal influence, Mr. Holzman approximates their patina, thereby establishing pictorial “atmosphere.” Splattered and layered surfaces, grayish in tonality, contain hints of ruddy green, coppery ochre and, in Makiko (2004), burnished orange.

Paper is rendered slate-like, yet it remains open and airy. The drawings of people, still-life set-ups and the natural world resemble scrap-like Old Masters’ studies. Mr. Holzman treats paper with a respect like that found in Asian cultures; several pictures—particularly the beatific Sensei (2004)—make clear his affinity for non-Western art. Paper isn’t just a yielding receptacle for marks, but a “space for the image to live in.” It is relished for its flexibility and physicality, its metaphorical and material capabilities.

A strain of self-consciousness permeates Mr. Holzman’s initial treatment of paper. Nathan Kernan, critic and curator of the exhibition, likens the deliberate evocation of age to “background ‘noise’” providing “something to dream into.” It could be considered a pictorial affectation, but Mr. Holzman gets away with it. With a delicate balance of texture and image, he sidesteps mimicry, nostalgia and preciousness.

The drawings are hard-pressed to “hold” their subjects, among them flowers, a canary, passing clouds and a tumble of onions. They exist as ghostly remnants of observation arising from silvery fields of marks. Erasure—an integral part of Mr. Holzman’s process—simultaneously obliterates and re-establishes the tangibility of, say, a tree in Yonkers. Indeed, Large Tree (2001–7) is a wisp, but it’s nonetheless there, concrete and specific.

Other drawings are more defined, but they avoid absolute definition. In works such as Basement Still Life (2003), evolution—or, as Mr. Kernan has it, “the passage of time”—is encapsulated and made permanent. They’re complete even as the imagery is in flux.

It’s a perplexing meditation on mutability, reminiscent of Giacometti’s quest for the real. Things similarly elude Mr. Holzman’s grasp, but the experience is an impetus for reflection, not pessimism. Putting pencil to paper offers a quixotic repose, an opportunity to look—glimpse is more like it—with startling clarity. As a draftsman, he’s careful but not hesitant, sure but not glib, tender but never sentimental. His art is, in its own densely wrought way, as pure and concise as haiku.

His figure drawings, while handsomely delineated, are the least convincing of the lot. The demands of likeness and proportion gently stymie intuition. Notwithstanding their irresistibly milky grounds, Maryann (2000) and Neil (1998) are burdened by mannerism. One exception is the otherworldly Misha (2005–7). In the portrait, a child with an appealingly louche manner sits with his legs crossed. He appears as a memory barely recalled, at least by the intellect—the heart is another matter.

These are works by an artist who disappears within his labors. Humility and anonymity mark his drawings. It’s not difficult, though, to discern the love that powers them.

Eric Holzman: Drawings, 1990–2007 is at the New York Studio School,
8 West Eighth Street, until May 12.

Sometimes scale is everything. Three years ago, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery exhibited a group of small paintings by Eric Holzman, moody deliberations on the conventions of Renaissance art. Currently, the Jason McCoy Gallery is showing recent landscapes by Mr. Holzman that now find him pursuing the same tangent-except for one thing: The paintings are big.

Mr. Holzman's investment in surface, in creating a fine and nubbly patina, is paramount to his ambition of tapping into the authority of the Old Masters he so clearly loves. Moving deliberately, Mr. Holzman's brush is motivated by tradition-burdened by it, too. Within the confines of a small canvas (there are examples at McCoy), the touch feels hemmed in and succumbs to a fussy nostalgia. When painting upon a large expanse of canvas, Mr. Holzman's approach is made vital and vigorous. Having to step back from the canvas while working provides for the artist a critical distance that does wonders for the paintings. Suddenly Mr. Holzman's art is less a reliquary to Western civilization than a world given air, space and light.

Just barely, though. A negotiation between illusion and material is part and parcel of the painter's craft. Mr. Holzman brings to this endeavor an intensity all his own. Though claiming to have realist aspirations, he's equivocal about images. Trees, figures and "a girl watching a duck take flight" are engulfed rather than delineated by scrabbled arabesques of oil paint. The upshot of this emphatic physicality, oddly enough, is weightless, ephemeral. The paintings are elusive and a bit frustrating-like memories you can't quite get a hold of.

But that's all to the good: Better Mr. Holzman giving grit and body to fleeting sensations than falling victim to a self-consciousness that is his greatest liability. He doesn't altogether avoid it here: The gridded charcoal lines flitting underneath the paint is an affectation-indeed, a distraction-that should be jettisoned ASAP. On the whole, however, Mr. Holzman's love affair with art and culture continues to salutary effect.

It is hard to imagine a contemporary artist further from today’s prevailing sensibilities than Eric Holzman. Antithetical to the glossy bounce of most Chelsea fare, the 45 drawings (1990-2007) on view at the New York Studio School, mostly watercolor, egg tempera and sometimes charcoal or graphite on prepared paper, are suffused with romantic yearning, as though plumbing the past to recover lost visions. Far from seeming like the next big thing, these could be fragments from a previous era: poignant representational notations discovered in the archives of a solitary mystic on the order of Ryder or Redon.

Working on mottled gray surfaces whose distressed grounds read as atmospheric space, Holzman appears to develop most of the drawings in increments, using line and washes, as well as spare, opaque white accents in the manner of the highlights traditionally found in old master drawings. Images often seem to have been conjured from tonal irregularities in the prepared ground, as when some discovered shape has metamorphosed into a cloud or a tree. One imagines him slowly working the page to see who or what shows up, then scrupulously attending to a precise description. The subject, whether his wife, child, a friend, or elements of a landscape or still life, could be emerging through a mist or through memory, as though drawing were a way both of accounting for what is before him and of recalling another lifetime.

The irregular, slightly puddling liquid paint in Middle Road (2006-07) establishes a fine chiaroscuro, and one delicate splatter quietly declares the work’s material process. We seem to be looking at a familiar site that nonetheless has the strange specificity of
a dream.

Their small size, delicacy and intensity of observation account for the intimacy of Holzman’s drawings. With their narrow chromatic range, the reticence and modesty of these images promote close viewing, as though one were listening to some quiet avowal. They bring to mind the small, exploratory works on paper by Turner, Constable and Victor Hugo.

Holzman’s drawings may also at times evoke Edwin Dickinson’s subtle range of tone, Walter Murch’s use of wrinkled paper as grounds or Jake Berthot’s eclectic romanticism. Like these artists, he reveres and pays homage to the tradition within which he works. While some of the drawings are preparations for Holzman’s large, moody and intensively worked paintings, they all carry their fragile weight as independent, distinctive realizations.

Girl Watching Duck, 2000-2004, 85x66

The first adjective that comes to mind to describe Eric Holzman’s new paintings is "slow," meaning both slow to be taken in and, evidently, slow to create (a number encompass spans of two to five years.) They seem to have come into being through a natural process of accretion, in which heavily worked paint surfaces, on dose scrutiny, appear to be made up of or to separate into colored particulate.

The larger canvases (89 by 69 inches) in the series "The Sky is Crying" are predominantly dark in tonality. At a superficial glance they look abstract, but longer viewing reveals their subject to be a landscape with a more or less ambiguously rendered tree that nearly tills the vertical canvas. In Untitled (The Sky Is Crying) III (2003), the dark, swelling form gradually disengages itself from its almost equally dark, scumbled ground. It could as well be a cloud as a tree—growing, billowing, turning over onto itself. This mutability does not transmit well in reproductions, but depends on a kind of alchemical interaction between oil paint, light and the human retina.

One painting in the show, Girl Watching Duck Take Flight (2001-02), was distinguished from the others by its somewhat more descriptive and narrative content. In the upper half of the painting, a towering autumnal tree merges with gaudy Maxfield Parrsh-orange clouds, while lower down the hues modulate to tenebrous blue-green-browns. A small, pale, female figure crouches, perhaps hiding, to watch a duck lift off from a lake. The painting’s rich, lapidary colors, and its intangible shapes and narrative, combine to project an aura of mystery wonderfully suggestive of, among other things, Classical myth, fairy-tale illustration and 19tn-cenlury Symbolism. Through fleeting intimations of Moreau, Redon, Ryder and Davies, one recognizes the work of an artist like no other.

A series of small paintings (14 by 11 inches) in the back room explored, again, imagery based on tree forms, this time using a range of predominantly blue-green hues and brighter values. Holzman gives the impression, in places, that he has allowed the image to be determined or suggested by the almost haphazard flow, puddle and smear of the paint. The same room also contained three large grisailles—a canvas diptych and two works on paper mounted to canvas. The diptych, Two Trees (2001-02; 87 by 127 inches), at first seems to recede into its generally pale values and elusive (and allusive) draftsmanship, but a closer examination reveals tumultuous violence and power. Spanning one wall of the gallery like the open pages of a giant book, it connotes a kind of wide-screen apocalyptic vision, manifested in swirling smoke, violent waves, parting seas and lumbering, vaguely humanoid forms like storybook personifications of the winds. The fierce, swirling imagery, combined with a delicate, sere touch, recalls both Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of natural forces and Sung dynasty paintings of mist-shrouded mountains or dragons evolving from smoke. It was hard to tear oneself away.

—Nathan Keman