Nick Willing

And then, of course, she died a few months later.

Drawing for her was a physical thing.

experience it was like entering a kind of different psychological world it's not a trance because she's completely concentrating and she's alive and aware her whole body is involved in the process one of the reasons she loved pastel so much is because everything you know from the toes up throughout the body are part of the drawing process and then throughout her life

she needed to find the right medium in order to tell the story appropriately of that moment.

And that might be charcoal right at the beginning with the early dog women and animal drawings in the early 1950s, through to wash, pen and ink in the 60s and 70s.

She was always doing other things as well.

Ah, the drawings and...

Then she, in the 80s, starts to draw with a brush.

She does huge drawings that are really paintings, I suppose, but they're not paintings as we might regard them because she's drawing with a line.

It's just that line comes from a brush.

And then she eventually finds pastels.

If she tried pastel in the 60s, it wouldn't have worked to tell the stories that she needed to tell in the 60s.

So in a sense, I don't see this as an evolution, rather that she is finding the right medium for the right story at the right moment.

That might be charcoal in one period, pen and ink in another, pastel in another.

The pastel, when it comes, is a search for a greater sense of naturalism.

And what is interesting about it is that in 2003, when she's making a pastel about the Iraq war, she's seen a photograph in The Guardian of a girl screaming, running towards the camera, and she's wearing a party dress.

Like your six-year-old's gone to a party and she's dressed as a princess.

You know as they do.

And behind her is a mother standing by the side of the road with a glazed, shocked expression holding a baby.

And mum saw that picture and she thought, oh, she looks exactly like my cousin Manuela, the girl running.