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Pictures of PeopleThis series of paintings is a celebration of my personal historical background, of the beauty of my parents and of my father’s photography. A bit like a pedigree for me, giving me a sense of who I am, why I am the way I am: these particular individuals provided my genetic make up. They were attractive, intelligent, eccentric, creative and sometimes glamorous. I like to think so, anyway.
There’s an element of nostalgia in these images, the joy of retro, a sense of loss and times gone that were times of innocence. They record growing up and growing old. The family album is a record of life stages: baby, toddler, schoolchild, teenager, bride, groom, mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandparent; of people you have known, places you have visited; the evolution of your parents and grandparents and their experiences. A history of you. Part of everyone’s history. But, like any history, you can’t take anything at face value. Photos have layers of meaning beneath the surface appearance, but you can never know what the reality of the thing was. Apparently banal or innocent images can conceal a darker significance.
The original photographs I work from are powerful, stirring all kinds of emotions in me. There’s the personal connection of course, but also a purely visual, aesthetic response to the images. By making a transcription from a photo to a painting, the context of the image changes. What was originally small scale, of purely personal significance and for private consumption becomes large format, in a different medium and for public exhibition. Viewer may know nothing of the people in the pictures, so their interest is mainly aesthetic. But photo albums are pretty much universal, aren’t they? So there's a resonance at a cultural level.
Take a picture of someone or some moment that’s precious, and you feel as though you’ve caught the essence of something forever. You’ve captured its soul, the emotion of that time, the feelings you experienced with that person in that place, and you keep it so you can experience those feelings again each time you look at the picture. The power of such images is clear when things go wrong and the memory of someone in a picture is a painful one you want to forget: you might feel the need to physically destroy that picture, remove the person from your memory, rewrite your history. The kind of thing that happened in Revolutionary Russia, when images of people who were valued political figures were removed from photos on their downfall. Russia was also mad keen on icons, precious images representing sacred individuals, that were kept in shrines, to be adored and revered.
Another aspect of family photos that I find fascinating is the convention of the snap shot. I wonder about the convention of smiling. Photography reached the masses and suddenly everyone was supposed to look happy in family photos. If you couldn’t raise a natural smile to reflect your joy, you were instructed to say ‘cheese’ to fool anyone looking at the resulting photo into thinking you were actually enjoying yourself. Why? Something to do with middle class ideas of the happy family, that you were comfortable in life, unlike the poor working classes, you were clean and bright and happy and the world was a lovely place. Sometimes, you can see some strange body language in these happy family photos: people leaning in awkwardly toward each other or smiling falsely – the trick doesn’t always work. Sometimes the way the subjects look at the camera reveals the truth: you get an idea if people were comfortable with the snapper or not.
Informal photos give a different view. When someone takes pictures of something or someone for no particular reason – no special, momentous occasion, just stuff they see everyday – it shows their passion for the subject. My father took pictures like this. He took hundreds of pictures, developed them himself with a home made enlarger in a make-shift dark room. His photos of my mother (before she was my mother) reveal his passion for her. She was beautiful and erotic and glamorous and he was mad about her. The photos of them in the early 1950s are some of the most poignant for me because I know that their love didn’t last long. When my sisters and I came along, my father seems to have experience a new surge of passion: he took lots of pictures of us doing ordinary things, going for a walk, sitting in a pram. They seem to be his way of showing love to us.
Photographs are a crucial part of creating your persona and how you look in photos is important. Doesn’t everyone want to look good? And doesn’t everyone cringe at a bad picture of themselves? The image we have of ourselves may not match the image in the photo: it might flatter, making you look fabulous; it might be a bad shot at a bad angle, catch your bad side and you end up looking fat and ugly and like your grandmother; or you may dismiss the image as nothing like you because it just doesn’t match the picture you have of yourself in your head. The scarey thing is when you don’t recognise yourself but other people say it looks just like you.