Ibn Sina: Figurative Painting

Ibn Sina: abstract figurative painting honouring the physician, philosopher and scientist of medicine

$300.00

About Ibn Sina

"A physician, philosopher, and scientist, and considered one of the most influential figures in the history of science and medicine"

He was practising medicine before he was twenty, and spent the rest of his life trying to write down everything he knew. The Canon of Medicine gathered what was understood about the body, its illnesses and its remedies into a single work, and for roughly six hundred years it was what physicians across the Islamic world and Europe were taught from. He also wrote on logic and metaphysics, on mathematics, astronomy, physics and music, and he refused to treat any of it as a separate subject.

Here he is painted as a man made of his own writing. His robe is covered in script, his beard opens out into forms closer to leaves or lungs than to hair, and his eyes, pale and steady in a face full of lines, are still working something out. The background burns orange behind him, the way a thought does when it will not let you sleep.

This one is personal. Pharmacy is the artist's other life, the one that runs alongside the painting, and the chapters Ibn Sina wrote on medicines are the oldest ancestor of that work. Of all the faces in this collection, his is the one she most wanted to get right.

He is in this collection for the size of the question he allowed himself. Most people decide early what they are not: not a scientist, not a writer, not someone who starts again at forty. He never drew that line, and the work of a single lifetime taught the world for six centuries. Hang him where you do your thinking. He is a reminder that there is more in you than one title.

An artwork from the "Trophy" collection

The people in this collection were painted for what they refused to accept. Some of them lived: a physician who tried to gather the whole of medicine into one book, a queen who would not take the seat she was offered. Others came from the artist's head: a machine that taught itself to build, a historian who travels through time, a detective, a gunslinger, a queen of the green world. She does not paint them the way history paints them. She takes what each one is known for, then asks what it looked like from the inside.

The message underneath every face is the same. There is more in you than you have been asked for. Each of them is given the ornament, the pattern and the colour usually saved for royalty, because the quality she is painting is not rare, it is only unused in most people. She hopes they are hung where they will be seen daily, and that they keep making the same quiet suggestion.