Ghislaine Howard is best known for her powerful evocations of shared human experience and for her acclaimed series of small paintings – daily meditations on world events. However there is another side to her work, one that is more domestic, intimate and erotic: "These works shown at Slick Dessin are playful meditations, day-dreams really, on themes associated with Ovid's Metamorphoses, which ever since its composition has been a never-ending influence on artists and poets. "The drawings pay homage to Ovid via Picasso. I have always loved Picasso: his virtuosity, imagination, creative energy and erotic force. But there is another Picasso: the Picasso of slumber and rest, the watcher and the watched.

The Artist's Studio

Centauress

"These classical figures give me an excuse to play with narrative and the nude; to present a series of meetings and encounters, dramatising my own life in disguised form, partly real, partly fantastical – subverting Picasso's overtly male perspective to one that is distinctly feminine: Picasso had the Minotaur – I prefer the centauress.

"The drawings present an enclosed world, a dreamscape where erotic violence is subsumed into a dream-like atmosphere of change and flux, a single calligraphic line set within a weave of undulating blues – a gentle reference to Picasso's famous Blue Period, but also a colour associated with the sea and sky, nostalgia, intimacy and tenderness. "I hope that these mythological conceits will delight and entrance. They were created for pleasure and to give pleasure." All the works are ink and pastel on paper.

Centauress departing

Arachne at her Loom