A little personal interlude, before continuing with the Big Picture. This painting first appeared here as 'A family portrait'. I must now confess, I did not intially paint it as such. As with many of my pictures, they are not always fully articulated on an intellectual level until some time after I have put my brushes down. While some pictures are the responses to an ongoing discourse, others are painted from the gut and demand some serious post painting contemplation to make any sense. These gut paintings can be surprisingly revealing. The emerging pictures are not always very pretty, but they, after the strutting and the fretting, signify something.
I began this painting after a visit to the Gagosian, on a day when the smart art set was outnumbered by a swarm of stonyfaced goons in cheap black suits, wires and shades. The reason for the hefty security was an 'intimate' exhibition of some of Picasso's lesser known works. As if any of Picasso's works were lesser known. However, they did have that 'whatever was left in the studio' feel about them, which the exquisite lighting and elegant hanging hadn't managed to dispel entirely. You could almost believe the carefully staged spontenaity - if you ignored the goons who took their job so seriously that they frequently inserted themselves between viewers and paintings, as if to guard an already traumatised Jaqueline from any further cruelty. My attention was drawn to a particular group of paintings all done in shades of gray, loosely painted on brown wooden boards. Of course the paintings were as punchy as any Picasso but it was the subtlety of the gray scale intensified by glimpses of golden brown board showing through which I really admired - allowing the cheap wood to shine like flecks of gold leaf. Clever. Around the same time Tate Britain were having a 'there is moore to More' show of sculpture exposing the dark side of Henry Moore. I went several times. Each time with the sound track to Brideshead on my pod. My pod has become the perfect sound shield against the strange comments people often feel compelled to make when attending exhibitions. Rarely clever. In the catalogue is a wonderful black and white photo of Mr Moore in his studio dwarfed by one of his great stone matrons. On the table in front is a box with the slogan 'Bovril is Liquid Life'. That got me painting. I liked the juxtaposition of the artist and his pygmalion and the very everyday reference to that very British concoction that is Bovril as the secret potion that would help the artist alchemist transform his great slabs of cold stone into primal images of new life.
I left the painting for some time. When I looked at it again, I suddenly saw a very personal portrait before me. Perhaps it was just a case of retroactive narcissicism, but I remember saying out loud 'the baby is me!' Clinging to a mother figure in her petrified magnificence and my father dressed in his bourgeois uniform, wearing a primitive, tragic mask looking over at the funny little thing with a mixture of apprehension and tenderness. It is a much more honest representation of our family unit than the black and white photos I still keep; they are as staged as a Picasso exhibtion, but without the goons to protect me.
