Dame Elisabeth Frink is perhaps best-known for her expressive animal figures and public sculpture commissions. Her childhood growing up near a military airfield in Suffolk during the Second World War provides the context for much of her work – she was fascinated by masculinity and its fragility, and explored it extensively in her sculptural work. Associated with the group of post-war British sculptors that included Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage and Eduardo Paolozzi, her fascination with both male and animal forms is self-evident. The motif of the striding or walking man is one she returned to frequently from the 1960s onwards, both in bronze and on paper.
Frink’s drawings are a fascinating exploration of volume and weight on the page. She approaches drawing with a sculptor’s eye – bound not by light, shade, or tone, but by the solidity and shape of the form.