About the work

The source for this drawing is a 2007 painting titled Head with Arches from a group of works that picture heads as a constellation of other things: flowers, a boot, a fan, arches. The original painting is also black and yellow but the colours are inverted here and made flat into a technical drawing. The oil paint on tempera has a feeling of illumination and heaviness that comes together slowly using sign-writers' brushes. Byrne has used drawing in this way to make metalwork dividers.

Date and country of birth

1973, DE

About the artist

Esther Pearl Watson, who is based in Los Angeles, grew up in series of small towns outside of Dallas, Texas with her siblings, mother, and flying saucer-building father, Gene. Her father’s flying saucers and the nomadic aspects of her childhood inspire her “memory paintings,” which playfully narrate the experience of an economically precarious family living in rural America. Watson’s work highlights an absurd, persistent, and particularly American optimism that only seems to grow stronger in the face of failures of family, policy and the American Dream Watson’s paintings depict farmland and highways, oil rigs and pay day loan storefronts, playgrounds and parking lots each with a brief memory written in the corner of the painting to describe the scene. All the while, glittering flying saucers dot the sky and the children, usually pictured in something of a cheerful tumble, seem to be the ones narrating the text as if recollecting the facts years later.

Esther Pearl Watson has an MFA from CalArts. Her paintings have been exhibited worldwide including at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Her award-winning comic ”Unlovable” is published in Bust Magazine and with Fantagraphics. She has published Blood Lady Commandos, on Vice online and Welcome to Crapland on Adult Swim online. She has taught at Oxbow Artist Residency, The Lexicon of Sexicana at Columbia College in Chicago, and Artist-in-Residence at Grafikiens Hus in Mariefred, Sweden. For twenty years, she taught design for social innovation for Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design.