$49.00
1 in stock
Certificate of Authenticity Included
Every original artwork ships with a signed Certificate of Authenticity confirming title, medium, dimensions, and artist provenance. Created with archival-quality pigment ink on acid-free paper.
Two figures locked in a tender embrace, an elusive hug rendered in loose black ink linework and scattered splatters.
The Elusive Hug started as a single line, then another, until two figures took shape wrapped around each other from behind. There is no face here, no eye contact for the viewer to catch. Just the shape of an embrace, wild scratchy hair, and arms that hold on a little too tight for a moment that might already be slipping away. It was drawn in Dayboro, Queensland, on a kitchen table, during a stretch when a hug from someone outside your own house was not a small thing to ask for, and plenty of people went months without one.
The ink moves loose and fast across the page, laid down with a dip pen so the line thickens and thins with the pressure of the hand behind it. Some strokes double back on themselves, some thin out to nothing, and a scatter of splatters sits across the bare white paper like the marks were flicked rather than placed. That looseness is deliberate. A tight, careful drawing would have missed the point entirely. This one needed to feel like it was made in a hurry, the way you hold onto someone when you are not sure when the next hug is coming, arms a fraction too firm, hair mussed from the closeness of it.
There is a quiet tension in the composition. Two people, backs turned to us, folded into each other, weight leaning in rather than standing apart. You cannot see whether they are smiling or crying, and that ambiguity is the whole idea. An embrace like this can hold relief, grief, or both at once, and no two viewers will read it the same way. The bare white background does the rest of the work, giving the figures nowhere to hide and leaving space for whoever is looking to bring their own memory of a hug they missed, or one they finally got after too long apart.
For Moments Like These sits inside the COVID Life series, a body of work built from the small, ordinary things that became precious once they were taken away, queues at the letterbox, waves through car windows, phone calls that stood in for a visit. This piece, titled The Elusive Hug, is one original ink drawing, not a print, made by hand at the Running Duck Studio bench in Dayboro.
For Moments Like These – The elusive hug
