by Emma Riva / Photo courtesy of Ron Donoughe
Ron Donoughe’s paintings rarely feature people, but on Thanksgiving weekend, his studio will be full of them. The Pittsburgh-based plein air painter is hosting Drawn Together, a group show highlighting decades of work from the drawing group he has held with several friends for the past thirty-eight years. The group is Donoughe, Victor Capone, Ed Charney, Scott Hunter, Rick Landesberg, Duncan MacDiarmid, Mike McSorley, John Ritter, Patrick Ruane, aand Stuart Smith.
Donoughe called the group “a drinking group with a drawing problem” that’s been getting together to both drink and draw since each member was a young upstart attending or living near Indiana University of Pennsylvania. It’s seen marriages, divorces, births, and deaths—but through all of that, the drawing group continued to make work. The group first met in its longest-running iteration in 1986 at various members’ homes.. Some of those early experiences are captured in Victor Capone’s pencil portraits, which show the men as they were in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Over time, each member of the drawing group’s artistic success has blossomed. Donoughe and Hunter both got their work acquired by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, McSorley’s into the Washingtonian Collection in Washington, D.C., and Landesberg even went as far as to teach sketch workshops in Tarn, France. Capone worked as an arts educator across the city of Pittsburgh and Duncan MacDiarmid has created public and private sculptures for libraries, churches, and universities in bronze, terracotta and polymers. All have had their work exhibited over the years; Ruane’s landscape paintings were recently in ZYNKA gallery’s This Land Is… in 2024. John Ritter had his work featured on the cover of Time magazine in November 2007.
The work in the show isn’t necessarily curated around a theme, but friendship can be a theme of its own. (In 2023, Liz Rudnick’s Platonic Solids group exhibition was a similar theme). Sometimes, what unites a show’s concept is just that the artists all wanted it to happen, and that is cohesive enough. Like the way food tastes better if it’s cooked with love and care, artwork feels more genuine if it was made with intention and warmth behind it. Drawn Together will have thirty-eight years’ worth of that.
And the variety in the work is something to celebrate. Hunter’s work veers into colorful and masterful abstraction, while Donoughe’s plein air paintings have the character and flourish that first drew me to his work and his books. Ed Charney’s work in Drawn Together is inspired by his time in the Midwest, where he became fascinated by barns and the flatness of the structure. John Ritter, who in his artist bio states that “My life is motion,” captures that motion through images of skateboarding. One of Mike McSorley’s paintings, of a teapot, takes a simple subject and elevates it with his artistic eye while still retaining its domestic warmth. One of Landesberg’s pieces is a white canvas with slashes of watercolor on it, different depths and thicknesses in each colored line showing how versatile watercolor paint can be. Duncan MacDiarmid works in both sculpture and two-dimensional canvases, but he makes his own custom frames for his two-dimensional works, giving each its own character.
Drawn Together will be on the second and third floor of Donoughe’s Lawrenceville studio building, which, if you’ve never been, is a fascinating look inside of his work, which I first became interested in when he released Ways of Pittsburgh, an inventive and beautifully painted book I reviewed in Petrichor.
So often art (and our world at large) is forced to be current and quickly produced, focused on what’s coolest and hottest and most recent to stay afloat. But then, those hot, fast, current things burn out and disappear, and many artists’ careers have flickered out that same way. Drawn Together celebrates longevity, that a long career with many turns and decades of work (sometimes as an artist, sometimes, in Donoughe’s case, as a gravedigger or a chicken catcher) is, too, worth displaying. Things that last, by nature, change, as this group of friends’ lives has over four decades.
Drawn Together will be open on November 30 from 3PM-8PM and December 1 from 10AM to 5PM. The exhibition will remain up until January 3, 2025 by appointment.
PETRICHOR 
Leave a comment