Sumac

A beautiful and deeply moving book by the internationally acclaimed painter Robert Priseman. This project presents a series of miniature paintings inspired by a set of dioramas constructed in Baltimore by Frances Glessner Lee, collectively known as the 'Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death'. They explore the deposition sites of the Ipswich Murders of 2006 and are each framed in an antique Indian shrine to help explore how trauma can define the sacred and how painting can act as a means to meditate our emotional responses to events. These areas of quite rural Suffolk countryside are also the same locality which the British artist John Constable made famous through his 19th Century landscape paintings. Accompanied by an in depth essay by the art historian Dr Matthew Bowman, an interview with John-Paul Pryor and an introduction by Robert Priseman first published in 'Art of England' this is a deeply moving and personal odyssey in painting and the written word.