The Moon (Feeling of Nearness)

Raphael Pepper's enigmatic pencil drawing of a full moon is one of the two in the Ben Uri collection. Both images reference the close and the far moon that can be observed at different points in time while the moon orbits the Earth and rotates on its own axis. The works also play with the viewers' vision and depth perception. As the artist and author, Cathy Lomax writes, 'Pepper's highly charged drawings are often mistaken for paintings but are in fact created with coloured pencil pigment, which he smudges, scratches and rubs to make areas of intense luminosity. His work hovers between figuration and abstraction by combining immediately identifiable imagery – trees, the moon, a hedgerow with swathes of imagined colour… Emotion is the dominating influence on Pepper's work but is often linked with a very tangible and mundane reality.'