ART GALLERY - Commentary

As a writer, I am loath to apply words to works that should inherently express everything I intended in creating them.

WITNESSES

The impetus for this project came out of the remarkable photographs that emerged from the Gomery Inquiry. Although the resulting series of portraits has nothing to do with that event, I am grateful to the news photographers who managed to capture that rare and fleeting moment when a public figure betrays a private truth.

Viewers are asked to imagine a graphic novel from which all the heroes have been excised, leaving behind only the villains and the fools, and to supply their own narrative for the story that exists somewhere among these lost and venal faces.

SUBTEXT

Beginning in 15th century Italy and spreading northward, it became the fashion in portraiture to identify the sitter,his rank and age in gold paint within the painting itself. At a time when portraits were exchanged by the nobility to cement political and marital alliances, these attributions were accepted as an acknowledgement of authentic likeness (although Henry the Vlll was famously enraged by the discrepancy between Holbein’s ‘Anne of Cleves’ and Anne herself).

During the 19th Century, photography rendered such niceties irrelevant, but recent developments in image enhancement and contortion have taught us to think twice about what we think we see.

I’ve subverted the convention here. In an age when a photograph is no longer a guarantee of an accurate representation, perhaps portraiture will become the more revealing form. Here the subtext conveys my sense of the reality that underlies the image and contrasts with its often grand, formal title.

The subtext, painted in transparent gold that floats on the surface of the canvas, can’t be seen in reproduction, so I’ve provided it in italic beneath the formal title.

THUGS AND MARTYRS

As a former convent girl, I have mixed feelings about saints. We are asked to accept that they were good while it’s perfectly clear that many of them weren’t very nice.

The first portrait in this new series is of Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker who was assassinated for making the film Submission, in which verses from the Koran were projected onto the body of a naked woman.

In my mind, there’s no doubt that Van Gogh was a martyr but – look at him –was he not also something of a thug?