In the smoky light of caves, our ancestors drew the figure. To the extent that we understand them, their motives appear to have been lofty. Early ancestors drew their desire for meat and children; for speed, power, cunning and forgiveness.

Some artists are still at it, but not for the same reasons. They no longer expect their drawings to save them, or even help them find dinner. They make them for exercise, for a chance to take a line for a walk around the familiar contours of breast, belly and backside. They make them to think about the world and their relation to it, and they make them in the hope of creating something that they can look at later and recognize as art.

"The Perception of Appearance: A Decade of Contemporary American Figure Drawing" at the Frye is a fiercely unfashionable approach to the subject. Guest curator Norman Lundin is a Seattle painter who prizes traditional skills as a kind of first premise. Once the skills are mastered, then comes expression.

There are plenty of people who don't agree, such as the late Willem de Kooning, who struggled against his (admittedly vast) skill all his life. He thought it inhibited him, providing him with easy answers to visual problems and pushing him into safe harbors when he longed for open seas.

In his essay accompanying the exhibit, Lundin doesn't seem to have considered that there are musical compositions that gain their greatness from "wrong" notes, that mistakes can be a bounty and rules a burden. This is his blind side, and it affected his choices.

Since his essay makes the musical comparison, it's fair to say "Perception" features too many artists practicing scales instead of playing compositions, although Lundin himself is not among them. His small, oil-on- paper "In the Studio" is fresh and supple, an example of skill too sure to show off, and expression fully achieved through simple means.

If "Perception" were cut in half to 50 entries, Lundin would have a terrific show. As it is, he produced an exhibit well worth seeing. It asks viewers to do their own editing, to imagine more space around each piece and less dead weight dragging good work down.

Nothing could drag down Edgar Jerins' large charcoal-on-paper "Tommy Tells a Story." The artist takes us down the dim corridor of an old house, its pine walls curving to an open space just off-center where a scrawny man sits on a chair. It's not the Rembrandt light that makes this drawing. That's corny and over-the-top. It's the space itself, which feels Southern and provides a wide angle on a narrow life.

Jermone Witkin's "Rebecca Stronger" gives feverish line a bad name. With it the artist creates bombast, not energy. Compare it to Robert Arneson's wonderful oil stick and conte crayon "Study of Man With Board on His Head." Arneson's feverish line pays off. It hangs near Brian Murphy's watercolor self-portrait and provides an effective contrast. Murphy drew his face as a cloud, full of colored air, floating and vulnerable. Murphy defies gravity and Arenson brings it down on his subject's luckless head.

Pat De Caro's "Two Figures" has a blunt charm, as does Kerry James Marshall's "Study for Nat Shango." The loony, skittery grace of John Wilde's "Hey Pisanello!" is a quality it shares with Peregrine Honig's "Creamsicle."

William Bailey and Ed Musante achieve greatness by leaving everything but the barest essentials out, and Robert Hanson achieves it through repetition. His title is the best in the show: "Nine Failures to Achieve a Likeness."

Steven Hudson's full figures are fascinating worms, but his version of feet is hale and hearty handsome. Hanneline Rogeberg's gouache figure studies are thick yet delicate, as is Kim Frohsin's study of a girl, although the latter is probably too dependent on Bay Area Figurative, which peaked in the middle of the previous century.

I like Linda Stojak's nude, which looks as if it's mired in red lipstick, and Gabriel Laderman's girl at a window, a modest exhibitionist. The late Gregory Gillespie's pencil drawing, "Man Mad," is small but deserves its own wall. Its intensity leaps out and forces a reckoning. If only that could be said of more of the others.