Life Draw & Paint

Since 1968 I have been drawing and painting ‘from life’. This section of the exhibition traces that journey, testing different media to see how a two-dimensional image might somehow capture a certain ‘presence’ of another person.

It seems that humanity has always made images of humans, whether those images are primitive archetypes of fertility, or of royalty and power, or of just another individual at a particular moment in his or her life. I am part of that deeply human urge, to make a relatively permanent symbol of a definitely evanescent human.

Our making images of each other is ubiquitous across human history. But the commonplaceness of this act does not diminish my desire to do it. I relish the paradox of how each of us must experience the world and our life as an individual, and yet our lives, and/or the memories by others of our lives, will ultimately submerge into the immense mesh of human existence, and into the distance of time.