''Breanna on a Syrian Rug'

Over the past fifteen years I have made several paintings on the theme of 'Women of Colour'. Having grown up in South America, I was puzzled when I came to study in London, by the absence of people of colour amongst the great themes of Western painting.
This is a painting of Breanna Boult, an Afro-American woman who works as a professional model here in Melbourne.

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I was born in the UK in 1941 and I grew up in Venezuela and Scotland.
I studied fine art at Chelsea College and the Slade School in London in the 1960s.
In 1978 I travelled to India, where lived for a year. I studied Meditation and Yoga there and these Eastern philosophies continue to be at the centre of my work.
Other influences include Middle Kingdom Egyptian Art and European Modernist painting, particularly the exemplary career of Henri Matisse.
The practice of drawing, which I consider to be a form of meditation, is at the foundation of all my work.

"What we need is a slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water; art that grows from modes of perception and making, whose skill and doggedness makes you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our nature. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media."
- Robert Hughes