You have to start somewhere and for Perienne Christian the start is part place part feeling. Her drawings may begin with a setting -Kensington Gardens or, nearer home, Horniman Gardens- but they sprout and ramify, seeding into imagined lands and situations.

I could suggest that, as she happens to be living in Brockley, just a few streets away from Howson Road where he was reared in the 1900’s, Perienne has attuned herself somehow to the mystical HB pencilled vision of the poet-painter David Jones. She hasn’t, because that’s not her style. She’s too observant, besides which she was barely aware of his work until well after she moved into the neighbourhood. There is however an affinity. Like Jones (and like the fairyland-frieze-painter Henry Darger who died in 1973 a year before Jones and in greater obscurity) she has a passion for the ins and outs of storytelling. Brought up with books and no TV and having therefore read her way through myth and fiction, now in her drawings, she concocts scenes, complete in themselves, that demand the attention, the perusal, that all good poetry requires.

These drawings are not illustrative. They are ruminative. The eye lights on crow or traveller, a bend in the road leading to higher ground, here and there a stretch of colour or sudden dark patch. Some people are leading figures, others are incidental, yet they are all equally animate, vividly embedded where needs must in each providential scheme of things. There’s a lovely exploratory quality here, a sense of the fabric of life.

William Feaver is a Painter, writer and former art critic for the Observer.