Around the galleries: Susannah Woolmer invites you to enjoy graphic art of a remarkable diversity and quality this month in London, Dublin and New York

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Susannah Woolmer

British artist and co-founder of the Jerwood Drawing Prize Paul Thomas is exhibiting a compelling selection of drawings from a series that explores the themes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The intimacy of London's The Drawing Gallery (37 Duke Street, St James, 44 [0]20 7839 4539) enhances the disjointed and fragmentary nature of the moments depicted in the works and encourages multilayered personal interpretations. Rich in visual conundrums, Thomas's drawings are playful, enigmatic and bewitching. 'Drawings from the Iliad and the Odyssey' runs until 25 February.

Derrick Greaves once described drawing as 'a kind of fix' and his passion for the drawn line is striking in fifteen works on display at 'The Pleasure of Drawing' at James Hyman Fine Art (6 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James, 44 [0]20 7839 3906) until 4 March.

The exhibition takes its name from a significant drawing Greaves produced in 1969 that can be seen as a sort of visual manifesto for the artist and his methodology. Here exhibited for the first time, it depicts a painting on an easel and a bird on the wing, the easel representing the artist and the bird in flight the liberating act of painting. Greaves's drawings emanate a quiet but palpable monumentality; each sheet possesses a purity and a compositional harmony that proclaims the potency of the line as a vehicle to convey meaning.

An interesting exhibition of contemporary graphic work of a slightly different tempo is taking place at The Kerlin Gallery (Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2, 3531 670 9093) this month. Around 200 works by David Godbold will be on display until 12 February, including several seminal pieces, many of which are being seen in Ireland for the first time here. Most of the drawings have been produced since Godbold's residency at P.S.1 in New York (1999-2000), a time when he began to develop his now distinctive style. Becoming increasingly concerned with the processes of production and dissemination of visual images, he began collecting wide ranges of 'waste' papers such as leaflets and shopping lists and incorporating them into his work, layering printed text with finely-crafted ink drawings and so creating fusions of the banal and the spiritual, visual cross-sections of high- and lowbrow culture. The results are disconcerting; often witty, irreverent, sardonic, thought-provoking and gloriously idiosyncratic.

Lamentably closing on 5 February is a rather special joint exhibition from Colnaghi, London (15 Old Bond Street, 44 [0]20 7491 7408) and Michael Werner, New York, which is being staged at the latter's premises (4 East 77 Street, New York, 001 212 988 1623). Sixteen superlative examples of graphic mastery comprise 'Correspondences: Drawings Past and Present', in which sheets of extraordinary delicacy and facility from the likes of Taddeo Zuccaro, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Guglielmo Caccia, II Moncalvo, sit harmoniously side-by-side with more recent works by Puvis de Chavannes and Sigmare Polke amongst others.

An exquisite double portrait of a married couple by Cornelis van der Voort and a light-hearted, richly-coloured late portrait of a trio of musicians by Pieter de Hooch are two of many highlights that speckle the sumptuous 2005 catalogue of portraits and other recent acquisitions from Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts (42 East 76 Street, New York, 001 212 5173643). The saturated colours of the garments worn by the rather corpulent figures in de Hooch's painting suggest that this was one of his later works. Also on offer is a sensual and enigmatic painting by the artist L. Beugholt, of whom very little is known (not even his first name), and a spectacularly powerful portrait of Sir Samuel Shepherd by Thomas Lawrence which demonstrates this artist's remarkable technical virtuosity to tremendous effect.