Of the exhibitions to be seen in New York this spring, one of the most memorable was Bill Jensen’s at the Washburn Gallery. At least one critic complained because the show was divided into two parts—drawings downtown, paintings on Fifty-seventh Street—but the separation made sense. Jensen’s notebook sketches would have been lost beside his paintings, and his paintings are best seen with lots of surrounding space.

Jensen uses drawing to clarify an idea when he gets stuck while working on a painting. Many of the drawings in the downtown gallery were dense, spiny images centered on a four-by-six sheet of paper with ample white space around them. This arrangement suggested a willed correspondence between the blankness of the page and the weightless space of thought: each fresh sheet affording him the opportunity for his ideas to expand freely, unfettered by previous association. The normal fate of such work is for it to be seen as secondary to the finished product. Yet the great virtue of this portion of the exhibition was that it re-created that moment when these drawings—fleeting images rapidly fixed—loomed as large in the artist’s mind as the inchoate goal they guided him toward. It thus restored them to their place at the center of the creative process.

Jensen’s paintings have a new fullness, and a greater precision—they speak with clearer voice.

Jensen’s paintings have a new fullness, and a greater precision—they speak with clearer voice. One can measure this by comparing the new