About a year ago...or is it two
years?...my Italian grand-nephew, when asked what
he wanted for his birthday, made a rather unusual request
for a young boy: a painting of my sister and me. He
was thirteen only a few days ago and he and his father
are coming from Rome to see me this weekend.
I started the
painting...whenever that was...but wasn't happy
with it and turned it to the wall for quite a while.
I scraped out and re-started umpteen times until the
canvas acquired a rough textured surface. Unable
to procrastinate any longer, I have finally finished
it. Probably it could still be re-worked but I'm going
to leave it as is and hope Emanuel will like it.
I've called it Two Sisters in
Time and inserted images of ourselves as children
in the faceted background. Dividing a background into vertical
strips of variegated colour is something I have found
myself doing over and over again for a very long
time, going way back to some of my earliest paintings
as a teen-ager. It's not a conscious decision - it
just happens. The feeling behind it, I think, is
a desire to escape from realism into a more abstract
dimension, but not entirely.
Two Sisters in Time Oil
on canvas, 2010-2011
Below is another painting using
vertical facets but I allowed abstraction to
dominate this one. It's from 1994 when I had a SPACE
studio in Hackney - the first photo was taken there.
I had the idiotic idea of using this unstretched painting
as a coffee table covering, folding the edges
down all around. Thus it remained until
a few weeks ago when I suddenly decided that it deserved
to be rescued from a utilitarian role and treated more
like art. I had to cut off the damaged edges,
so the canvas is somewhat smaller than its original version,
but I think it's survived life as a tablecloth pretty
well.
Hackney studio 1994
Music and Love Oil
on canvas, 1994
1 comment:
What an amazing nephew you have - and it turns out that he is quite the muse, because that painting is wonderful. I hope he appreciates it. :)
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