Ink drawing is an intimate medium. It requires a skill of hand and eye for detail. William Rusedski’s ink drawings have these characteristics, and more often a fabulistic eye for the imaginative subject.These images Rusedski has, since childhood, made drawings. His recent works are saturated with forms and images that merge into one another, or transform into still others. There is an obsessive character to these drawings, as if they provided us access to the inner workings of his mind, without any filtering device. Drawn in black and white, these images have a graphic sense. The contrast between images and the page creates a metaphoric space of the imagination. We sense that we are looking into these images, to see the faces and forms of imaginary people, or birds, or animals (notably horses).

The fusion of imagery in these works borders on the pure abstraction, and there is a sculptural sense to the intertwining of matter as represented by the drawn image and the neutral white space of paper. These drawings derive purely from Rusedski’s imagination, and are representations of a world that is part-myth, and part-reality.

Yet another branch of Rusedski’s ink on paper drawings involves caricature and the situations he presents in these lively colour works are part comical, part theatre. He carefully colours each piece by hand and the results are edifying Each work depicts an imaged character or level of elegiac calm. In these paintings, the illusionary effect that exists between the surface tension and background depth in a composition seems to exist on its own, in a specific place and time, independent of reality and that is exciting. In the best, there is reposeful, reflective and purely abstract movement that goes on.

Rusedski paints landscapes of imagination, sometimes successfully, where each element is synthetic and self construed. This could be the strength of his work. It can also explain the gaps, and absences that accompany the effects of light, colour and space in these paintings. The style Rusedski uses demands from us an immediate response. It emphasizes the movement of hand and eye.

The speed with which this artist works is remarkable and is analogous to the speed of modern day life. The rapidity of Rusedski’s style is comparable to the way we recognize, consume and digest imagery in daily life. Indeed, the variety of sensations that exist in real life are largely unrecognized by most of us, such is the speed of contemporary life. We seek to construct a synthetic world, where images, visual metaphors, become approximations for an intuited (not real) world.

All of this said, Rusedski’s painterly approach is purely visual, and as experiments they either work or they do not. Like a modern-day scientist, Rusedski experiments, and the results are edifying, a trial and error process. This is true of all artists who achieve Some resonance is the language of expression they work in, be it music, theatre, film or art. When these paintings work, they resonate with colour, light and life.

Even though we cannot always read their contents as figural or realistic subjects, they become equations for the living world around us. A series of works with black backgrounds, and brought textural thick paint striations range among the most successful of Rusedski’s recent paintings. If anything, they contain an element that is so often missing from contemporary art, and that is a sense of drama, of the theatre of life, and of the gesture.

For this reason, Rusedski can be considered an artist who stands outside the fatalist postmodern paradigm, still enjoying the world he paints, creates, invents, recognizes within.