Sketchbook

Drawing by Ewan Atkinson

His First Wigwam, to Wind Up the Moon (2006); mixed media on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches, from the Fiction series. Image courtesy the artist

Ewan Atkinson’s Fiction series — works on paper executed variously in watercolour, gouache, ink, collage — is set in “a living place, surrounded by other living places,” according to the artist’s “welcome note.” This “living place” — an island presumably, since it is “surrounded, again, by water” — is inhabited by a cast of mysterious characters: an unnamed businessman, Little Girl Blue, Starman, Miss Williams (who “has a black man in her belly”), and an identical male pair, who may be twins, or lovers, or two aspects of one person. Also stray dogs: “placeless . . . pathless path-makers, observing everything.” Atkinson’s delicate, weird drawings incorporate fragments of maps, diagrams, flow-charts — but their data is unquantifiable and they explain nothing. The Fiction series was first exhibited at the Zemicon Gallery in Barbados in 2007.

Drawing by Ewan Atkinson

Love Hate Indifference (2006); mixed media on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches, from the Fiction series. Image courtesy the artist

Drawing by Ewan Atkinson

Miss Williams, Conrad in Her Belly (2006); mixed media on paper, 17 x 14 inches, from the Fiction series. Image courtesy the artist

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The Caribbean Review of Books, August 2008

Ewan Atkinson is a Barbadian artist who has shown his work internationally and in several solo shows at the Zemicon Gallery in Barbados. He is a tutor at the Barbados Community College.