Two Old Women and a Brain

Life and art often lead to an expression of mixed metaphors in my work. Even if odd, sometimes surreal effects are not my original intent, the drawings I have made over the past three years generally end up looking that way. I attribute this to trying to manage a chronic health condition while revising and completing a large collection of sketches from my travels. Sometimes one insinuates itself into the other.

I was in receipt of a CD of a brain scan. It came in a nice square package. What if I finished one of my small square drawings in such a way as to illustrate the contents? I found a good candidate for revision in a study I had done outside of a cathedral where two old women were sitting on a bench near a buttress. I considered the drawing unfinished because there were large, uninteresting blank areas. I had originally intended to use the unfinished sketch as a study for a small painting. But since I have been making studies into drawings whether they had become paintings or not, I decided that the two old women were good candidates for an odd little visual statement. The large blank area cried out for something unusual. Why not a large brain painted on the side of the cathedral buttress? The brain I put there is not entirely accurate, but it does the job. And one more strange little drawing can be added to my collection, "Two Old Women and a Brain."