His chosen media - black pastel or oil stick - make for the emphatic statement. Such media are unforgiving: the drawing cannot be corrected or adjusted later.

"Once you've made a mark you can't change it - you cannot rub it out ... You put yourself in a state of intensity in a way and you just keep on working. You don't want to stop because you know that if you stop you break the rhythm of the work. So you have to keep going. Those big drawings have to be done intensely all the way through to the finish."

So Senbergs bluntly tells the curator, Elizabeth Cross, in a conversation reprinted in the excellent catalogue to the show. It's that "all or nothing" quality, an absolute commitment to the task at hand, that makes his presence felt and generates the nervous excitement in these drawings.

Patrick McCaughey on Jan Senbergs
in The Age