Sketchbook

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.

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

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.