This magnificent drawing combines two of the artist’s favourite motifs, The Running
Man and a Baboon: similar drawings, also done in 1985, are reproduced in Edward
Lucie Smith Elisabeth Frink , Sculpture and Drawings since 1984 p.148-149 and in
Elizabeth Frink, Humans and other Animals, Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia
2018, p.138.
Edward Lucie-Smith writes that in ‘’The mid 1980’s Frink’s drawings began to change
in a radical way. They become more pictorial, and at the same time bolder, much less
concerned with suavity or elegance. An early instance of this shift in style is Man and
Baboon. Frink here brings together two images seen previously in her work, combined
to make a narrative. The man, a new version of her runners, flees from the presence
of the animal which contemplates him somewhat sardonically. In this drawing Frink
may have meant to symbolize the defeat of the supposedly ‘civilised’ by purely
instinctive and natural values….the pencil strokes are notably bold and vigorous; the
whole sheet even the background area is covered with rhythmic hatchings, which
helps to knit the centrifugal composition together’’.