Drawing
Brain Series
Brain Series
This drawing series began with a fascination into the brain and how it works. When I began the project in 2001 we only knew how 3% of the brain works since then there has been increased research and study. The investigation began by thinking about the labyrinth and I came across a minotaur-like sculpture in the basement of the V&A Museum that had a revealed brain. The sketchbook drawing was transferred into this large scale drawing and led to a sequence of large scale drawings and architectural installations at Canonbury Art Gallery for a solo exhibition in 2003.
Minotaur
In these mixed media drawings I innovated drawing techniques to replicate the texture of brain. Nuts and bolts are applied to various areas and other mixed media elements. Please find a link to the catalog that my dear friend, Ann Infield wrote a contributing essay.
Big thanks to Shaun Clifford for curating this exhibition.
Museum Drawing
My favorite past time is drawing in museums and when I travel I take my sketchbook everywhere and more recently I’ve been doing a drawing on a postcard of the women artisits in the Museum. Albrecht Durer said that the precision of thinking is linked to the precision of drawing in the Treatise of Measurement. Often the drawings will become prints or paintings. In the Gardner Museum in Boston the drawings became the starting points for silkscreen prints.
Portraiture
Drawing faces has been one of my talents and over the years I’ve experimented with different ways of drawing and I love to invent mark-making. While living in London, I was invited to draw portraits for a local newspaper called The Alliance. This was an alternative left paper and I was on the board with Paul Foot and various other left leaning journalists.
Indro Sen was a colleague in London, U.K. and I taught three of his four children art over the years and they are all doing super important creative work now. He was one of the first victims to die of COVID19 in May 2020. He fought for justice his whole life even when the battle was detrimental to his own self-worth.
He will be remembered for the fights we won and the fights we lost. My own personal memory of Sen is his great taste in music and at the end of a gruelling school year in the hot, sticky east end of London, he would put on some music and it would lift our spirits.