Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Joseph Yoakum
American; 20th-century
Bloomington, IL: Cometogetherspace
73%
Mt. Lister near South Magnetic Pole in Wilksland Antarctica Island. c1970. Colored pencil and ink on paper
It's a prevailing cohesion despite their sinuosity and disjointedness that makes Yoakum's drawings impressive — see how downwards taper of the groves makes them inversions of the mountains all around them, or how the clouds copy the movements of the hills. But it's the moments in his pictures of incoherence and interruption that make his art aesthetically substantial. Check out, for instance, that lone tree that's just to the left of this drawing's center, or that yoni between the mountain peaks at left. Yoakum, in addition to his natural acuity as a draftsman, had a sense for the poetry of landscape. (TFS, 2025)
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
73%
Mt. Humphrey’s Peak. 1970. Colored pencil and ink on paper
What's before and what's behind anything is tough to determine in this drawing, especially given that chute near the picture's dead center where blue sky blends into tan maybe-sky blends into green earth — if that tan band between blue and green is meant to be seen as a strip of land in the middle distance, then perspective is working even more impishly than it initially seems to be. There are two types of Yoakum drawings: the ones whose value lies in their cramming together of so many conflicting planes and decorative features, and the ones (like this one) that are fairly open and through that openness confound easy looking. The latter tend to be a bit better because that confounding of vision makes whatever's legible seem that much more significant. See the four small outlined trees about an eighth of the way up in this drawing; they anchor all the impossible swoops and bends around them. (TFS, 2024)