When created in parallel to the sculptural cycles, Dial’s drawings provide another means through which he engages big ideas. 9/11: Interrupting the Morning News shows a large-scale site (the World Trade Center). Its formal similarities to The Morning of the End of the World demonstrate Dial’s desire to create the same moment and place through immediate marks on paper and sustained overlaid construction. Dial again uses this approach in his drawing Katrina and the construction Broken Levee (2005), which show the large-scale energy and violence of Hurricane Katrina in very different media. In Katrina, two figures are veiled, their lips, noses and eyes barely visible through Dial’s smudges. The chaos of the drawing is the confusion and destruction of coastal Louisiana. Similarly, Broken Levee shows a helpless figure amid swirls of disorderly fabric. Its predominantly blue surface is both the flood and the storm; layered objects communicate the wind, energy, and failing infrastructure at the height of the hurricane.
