FRANK NOVEL

First published: September 2025

For over 50 years, an Erie artist has filled sketchbooks with stream-of-consciousness drawings – now these visual diaries are at the heart of a show in his hometown

“Drawing from Within: the Sketchbooks of Frank Novel” reveals 60 or so paper and large banner enlargements from dozens of the artist’s sketchbooks dating back to the 1970s. In the exhibition’s entrance at the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania is a large table where, at unscheduled times, one might meet Frank Novel. At first, he may seem engrossed with drawing in his current sketchbook, but he is happy to look up from his wheelchair and talk to visitors. In recent years, the long-term side-effects of psychotropic medications have left Novel (pronounced Nóvel), previously an inveterate walker, with an unsteady, shuffling gait. He lives as an outpatient in a high-rise apartment building off Erie’s central downtown street, half a mile from where it ends at the Lake Erie shoreline.

Untitled, 1994, ink on paper, 8 x 11 in. / 20 x 28 cm, photo: Fred Scruton

The exhibition begins in a low-ceilinged corridor with an enlargement of a drawing on vinyl fabric: in the centre, four happy, child-like characters stand in a diagonal row. What might be over-sized drinking cups, huge candles, or barrels with fuses, sit between the figures which are rendered in a way that suggests comic book or children’s drawings, while an intricate filigree of cells – a dense, somewhat Adolf Wölfli-like labyrinth – surrounds them and fills the page.

Untitled, 2003, marker on paper, photo: Fred Scruton

Novel usually carries a sketchbook when he goes out. Drawings made while he was still able to walk or bus around the city were often dated to consecutive days, many giving disjointed impressions of the urban landscape. Enveloped in webs of line drawing, small stick (or striding colossus) figures, broken streets and railroad tracks, pedestrian warning signs, stores and buildings, are all drawn-up into a tumultuous patchwork. Often a main roadway cutting through the chaos leads to a serene sunny sky over water (Lake Erie?) on the horizon.