Channing Penna | Moving Line

Movingline, the exhibition and the book, is the outcome of a seven-year exploration of the science and humanity of movement. With pencil, Channing captures nature's energy, beauty, and rhythms in a series of sixty eight drawings. In this extraordinary body of work, the intimacy of her art is initially represented by images of crashing waves, birds in flight, and racing horses. Her pursuit of motion then evolves into renditions of dancers and musicians performing, and complex portrayals of the human face. Organic and surprising, Channing's drawings are unforgettable for the power of their line, the drama of their black and white compositions, and the innovation with which they are rendered.

Channing's drawings evoke motion in every stroke. From the clearly descriptive to the nearly abstract calligraphic improvisation, she exhibits extraordinary fluency and remarkable range. She captures the relationship of order and chaos in nature, and produces drawings that evoke deeper understanding and considerable pleasure.

-Judith Wechsler
National Endowment for
the Humanities Professor
at Tufts University

Channing's deeply personal art has touched a force that cannot be explained, but can be experienced. The wave with its power, symmetry, grace, danger, and inevitability can be found replicating itself in the natural motion of her subsequent renditions of birds, horses, dancers, musicians and portraits. The immediacy of her interpretations allows viewers to experience not only her responses, but their own.

-Judy O'Malley
editor at large

Her black and white collection captures what would happen if M. C. Escher's creatures were to break free of their tessellations and come to life.

Sarah E. Fagan, ARTSCOPE New England, September / October 2008

Through the extraordinary movement of her drawings she has reached what T. S. Eliot referred to as The Still Point: At the still point of the turning world... there the dance is... where past and future are gathered....

Maureen Alphonse Charles, Dedham, MA

Art that almost feels like a visual impossibility, a conquering of the mind - but there it is!

Diana Roberts, Greenfield, MA

I will visit again and again, if just to remind myself of the possibilities and power of life.

Pat Brian, Boston, MA