The title Obsessive Patterns refers to a formal quality shared by the exhibited works—meticulously drawn or painted marks, showing obsessive attention to detail—a quality here expressed as abstract and semi-abstract patterns on paper (Tayo Heuser and Jane Masters), on rawhide (Dean Snyder), or on wood and canvas (Neal Walsh). While Heuser's and Masters's works are quiet and meditative, Snyder's and Walsh's pieces are vibrant and energetic; the former are precise and repetitive, and the latter are sketchy and unpredictable.

Although the word obsession often refers to a frame of mind or a state of being haunted by a persistent idea, desire, or emotion, in this case it points to painstaking craftsmanship—a labor-intensive, time-consuming process in which one's inner experience of the world is externalized visually as a number of intricate patterns. Similarly, pattern often alludes to a type or class, something predictable, such as human behavior or arrangements of form. Here, pattern is used in the sense of design, or as a repetitious and systematic ordering of pictorial marks within a visual field. Despite their different aesthetics, materials, and techniques, the exhibited works by Heuser, Masters, Snyder, and Walsh reveal obsessive pattern-making that speaks of the artists' drive to materialize their re-occurring perceptions, feelings, or thoughts into an orderly visual design.

Dean Snyder's installation merges sculpture and drawing to create an environment that is, like a playground or a junkyard, playful and loud, familiar and grim. Spread out onto the gallery walls and ceiling, Snyder's hybrid forms are essentially elaborate tattoos drawn on rawhide with a tattoo machine. Some are two-dimensional drawings stretched on frames of various sizes. Others are stitched together and inflated with air, swelling out like balloons or puffy sacks. Some—such as Cheak, Polup, and Snood—bow and buckle off the wall, while others stand freely on the floor or are suspended from the ceiling. Their cartoonish imagery tattooed in a bold, black line on natural rawhide creates rough, yet luminous surfaces that when inflated glow with inner light. Although each of these drawings is slightly different, when grouped together they create a range of irregular patterns that recall comic books, doodling, or surrealist automatic writing. There are no particular narratives here; rather, they are vague and ambiguous emblematic drawings that follow the artist's stream of consciousness. There is something humorous, lyrical, odd, and erotic in these works; they remind one of an animated cartoon world, both familiar and surreal, inhabited and dream-like.

Snyder was born in Philadelphia and received his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Providence. He has exhibited widely through-out the United States, including at Miller Block Gallery, Boston; Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago; Jenjoy Gallery, San Francisco; Usdan Gallery, Bennington College; Hood Museum, Dartmouth College; Tang Museum, Skidmore College; and the De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park.

Tayo Heuser's large-scale pen-and-ink drawings bring to mind a basic impulse of all artists—to leave a hand-made mark on a flat surface—that at times borders on obsession. Working on long sheets of paper, Heuser draws and redraws tiny marks that resemble dots, squares, letters, and graph lines, thereby creating fields of overall abstract patterns. While some sheets of paper are matte, others are burnished according to an old Arabic tradition: paper is coated with wheat starch, egg white, alum as a binder, and soap, and then rubbed with stone, resulting in a highly polished and shiny surface. Despite the precise lines and dense patterns, the drawings appear loose and weightless. Monochromatic in tone and infused with light, they are extremely subtle and quiet. The titles—Flight, Lost Letters, By the Pool, or Beyond the Screen—only reinforce their introspective quality.

The tremendous concentration, discipline, and hand control that goes into these drawings opens up space for the viewer's contemplation. Yet, their large scale relates to the body, evoking an experience that is corporeal as well as meditative. Like the ornamental art of the Ottoman Empire, specifically textiles and Arabic writing, which are inspirational forces for Heuser, her drawings are impressive in their sheer intricacy, suggesting that patterns order, but also embellish, the perceptible world.

Heuser was born in Washington, D.C., and lives and works in Narragansett. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from Vermont College, Montpelier. Her work has been shown locally at the Newport Art Museum; Wheeler Gallery and Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; and through-out the U.S. at the University Art Museum, Cali-fornia State University, Long Beach; the Weather-spoon Gallery, University of North Carolina; and Washington Square Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Jane Masters presents three series of drawings using silverpoint, charcoal, and scratchboards. Made with a stencil cut from mylar, the silverpoint drawings consist of crisp and delicate silver lines meandering over the white surface. Some are organic and elastic, while others are geometric and contained. Meticulous and intricate, they radiate a sense of expansion, movement, and three-dimensionality. A similar feeling of optical vibration and rhythm is also evident in the scratchboard drawings, yet the contrast of black and white is reversed. Instead of drawing silver lines on white paper, Masters scratched lines out of white cardboard coated in black India ink, creating crisp and clear patterns that are obsessively precise. In the Zoomorphic series of large charcoal-stenciled drawings, Masters created heavy black-and-white patterns with stencils of various botanical shapes—bulbs, vines, leaves, plants—and then rubbed them with charcoal. With soft, smudged edges, these interlaced motifs form a forceful abstract composition. Creating an optical illusion, the floral patterns here suddenly turn into zoomorphic designs resembling butterflies or bats, thus recalling Rorschach blots. Intrigued by organic structures—such as corals, ocean waves, and galaxies—and their inherent abilities to create endless visual patterns, and inspired by the tradi-tional crafts of lace making and crochet, Masters blends together natural and manmade patterns while simultaneously creating her own.

Masters was born in London and lives and works in Providence. She came to the U.S. in 1982 and received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from San Jose State University in California in 1992. She has shown work nationally and internationally at Williams College Museum of Art; Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Lima, Peru; the Center for Sculpture, University of Leeds, England; and most recently at the RISD Museum, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia.

Neal Walsh combines different materials—ranging from oil, pastel, dry pigment, ink, and graphite to masking tape and pages ripped from newspaper and old books—to create works that fluctuate between collages and assemblages. Walsh builds his surfaces by layering the materials on a wooden panel or a canvas, then removing some and adding others in their place. In this time-consuming, labor-intensive process of adding and sub-tracting, scraping/ripping off and putting on, each work goes through a phase that allows chance to play a part, but only to be balanced or controlled by the artist's hand. In this sense, Walsh's work parallels interchangeable patterns in nature and life: growth and decay, chance and control.

Walsh's workbook: notes and totems is a grid comprised of twenty-five wooden drawers, each with a different pattern created by applied layers of oil paint, pigment, pastel, graphite, and encaustic. Some patterns are linear, others are textural; some create flat, silky surfaces, while others are heavy and built up. Grouped together, their repetitious patterns create a whole that appears at once raw and soft, dense and loose, opaque and translucent. Similarly, his paintings are based on a grid, with repeated patterns within the frame of the piece—pages torn from books are covered with different layers of oil paint and oilstick and then scraped down—that produce a surface that is opulent and glowing.

Walsh received his BA from the University of Rhode Island in 1991 and lives and works in Providence. He has exhibited his works at the Providence Art Club, Rhode Island Foundation Gallery, AS220, and Gallery Agniel, and at galleries in Massachusetts and Louisiana.