The Drawing Room is an exhibition of prints, drawings and casts (bas reliefs) done at intervals over a period of around 20 years between 1990 and 2009.

At each interval different creative impulses prevailed. The Drawing Room is set up to display not only the art created at each interval, but also the impulses that fed the creative processes at each distinct phase.

In the prints of the early '90's, at the start of my artistic endeavour, musical and literary material fed an emotionally labile period in my life: a new life beginning, sun setting on an old life and its bonds, drama and Romanticism the result.

The casts from the mid '90's were homage to Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, father of modern anatomy, and his engraver and collaborator in their grand project, Jan Wandelaar. It was, as well, my endeavour to come to grips with anatomy and the figure.

Drawings from the Muse, from the year 2000, came during a phase where I was fascinated with the capacity of the mind to spontaneously generate material 'out of nowhere', on the page, without plan or premeditation. There are also a couple of studies from this phase: Darwin, one of my heroes, and from the work of another, Fra Angelico.

In 2008 writer and poet, Stephanie Green, asked me to respond (not to illustrate, but to respond) to a series of her poems. The result was another set of drawings with a different genesis, one born of trying to inhabit someone else's work.

The Drawing Room will be an interior space, not just an exhibition: furnished and replete with materials and writings. Visitors can sit and contemplate, if they wish, not only the artworks, but the materials and thoughts that formed the influences and motivations underlying them.

James Yuncken, July 2015