Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie
oil on canvas
50 x 60 cm
1992
private collection

Salman Rushdie as DIY Zola
image size 35 x 27cm
paper size 59 x 52cm
Lithograph
1993

The pastel drawing of Salman Rushdie incorporates a text from Rushdie's poem 6th March 1989 written when the Fatwa had just been issued and Rushdie had gone into hiding. The poem first appeared in the Fall 1989 issue of Granta magazine.

From Sacred and Profane / Drawing to a Conclusion (1997),  p. 20

The  portrait (left) shows the writer in the midst of my dream of his dreams of India and London. This occupied a dozen or so sittings over a period of almost a year.  After two attempts at etchings I made a final lithograph in which Salman is equated with Dreyfus. He wears a (ficitious) T-shirt inscribed with the cryptic name 'Jack Hughes' to echo Zola's famous accusation.

Many of these images were also incorporated into Merely Connect, a book I made while artist-in-residence at Harvard's Carpenter Center, on which Salman collaborated at a distance.