Obsessive Drawing, a fascinating and beautiful show currently at Manhattan's American Folk Art Museum, offers an occasion to meditate on the reasons this sort of work came into fashion. Today its popularity and commercial value have increased so dependably that, at a Christie's auction last January, a piece by self-taught sculptor William Edmundston sold for more than $35,000. The five artists whose work is on exhibit—Eugene Andolsek, Charles Benefiel, Hiroyuki Doi, Chris Hipkiss, and Martin Thompson—are all considered by the museum to be "emerging artists," a term that raises the intriguing question of what they are emerging from, and what sort of milieu they may find themselves emerging into.

The five artists here live in places that range from Pittsburgh to Tokyo, from France to New Zealand. But what they have in common, writes curator Brooke Davis Anderson, is a working method that is "labor intensive and painstakingly precise" and a "cautious, almost spiritual approach to placing marks on paper."