I have always worked in two veins…one which is very personal and one which is more “public”, for lack of a better word. The people in the paintings in The Way We Were are from pop culture print media, referencing old department store catalogues and pulp romance novels. While they are paintings of people, these people do not really exist so I don’t really put them in the same category as my portraits. With my portraits, I work from photographs that I take of people I know, mainly family and friends, and I am very selective about who I choose to paint. These paintings take many hours, days and weeks to complete, so if I choose to paint someone, I have my reasons. Every once in a while, however, I come back to painting myself.
Self-portraits interest me, and there is so much to be learned by looking at artists’ self-portraits throughout art history. With mine, there is often a story behind the painting, a narrative that is hidden in the symbols. They are usually painted at key turning points or events in my life, and the hours I spend on the painting are very much like quiet contemplative time for me. A lot of people were intrigued these portraits during the Crawl, so I thought I would turn to my blog to talk about the stories behind these paintings.
My first miniature self-portrait was She wanted to do more than just pass…. This was painted while I was still living in London, after a trip to Italy, where I had just seen Raphael’s Lady with a Unicorn at the Galleria Borghese. I liked the composition of the painting, with the Italian landscape in the background and the architecture of the columns framing the piece. The expression on the subject’s face was ambiguous and with a little unicorn on her lap, no one has ever been able to explain exactly who or what this painting is about.
Lady with a Unicorn - Raphael (c. 1505)
My British visa was coming to an end and with my art career in mind, I had to decide where I wanted to go. I was waiting to hear back about a residency in New York at the time, and also in the process of applying for a work permit to stay in London. These were my two obvious first choices, however, Vancouver was always an option as well, as it has always been home to me. So in the background of She wanted to do more than just pass…, there is New York on one side and London on the other, with the Atlantic Ocean shrunken between them. The triangle is completed by my faithful lap dog, representing home, with an expression that hints he may know more than we think. The stone building and seat that the Lady is seated on has become concrete and there is a haze of smog over the bi-city skyline.
She wanted to do more than just pass... (2006)
More about the choice of clothing and title in my next post.
