Blog
After 5 years I finally get it
Political agent from Udaipur City Palace
27/12/2020
'In imagination, we chase the dead, shouting, ‘Come back!’ We may suspect that the voices we hear are an echo of our own, and the movement we see is our own shadow. But we sense the dead have a vital force still –they have something to tell us, something we need to understand.' Hilary Mantel, BBC Radio 4, Reith lecture 2017
It has only just occurred to me what I have been painting for the last 5 years. When I first visited India and came across 16 portraits of political agents of the Raj, painting them was a way to get an exhibition together, to get back to India, to be in Udaipur. After 5 years of painting single faces of men I now understand that I am responding to the call by each image I have studied to answer them with my gaze.
My subject became studio portraiture of the 1850s, first the political agents then the Royal Princes, the British Raj officials; always the single (male) figure looking, in his own present time of the sitting, from the past at the lens of his photographer who stands where you and I stand. The men would have been thinking of other viewers, the admiring family, the supplicant, the purchaser, the worshipper, the envious rival.
The visual language of these images is probably typical in its scope of any public portraiture: Fayum and swagger portraits, images of kings, leaders, officials to be shown in public places, mementoes, talismen. On the religious side icons, gods sitting in shrines, rood screens - anywhere that a didactic, expressive one-to-one relationship is being expressed. There is the person looking out, the pose, the clothes, the facial expression, the background, the items sharing the pictorial space. We are overseen by these eyes that follow us.
The single constructed curated image is what interests me. My interest began with reading that Emperor Augustus liked people to shield their eyes from his gaze so they were not scorched. This power of the gaze to transfix and speak to the beholder is what mostly interests me, and because it assumes a living relationship between viewer and viewed.
I’m specially interested in the ‘active’ gaze between image and viewer, ‘Darshan’ in Indian theology in which there is living spiritual exchange between image and viewer. This must have applied to Christian portraits too, hence the eyes of saints and angels scratched out of any church you care to visit by Reformation iconoclasts, blinding the images and taking away their power to communicate through their eyes.
So what I'm doing with my paintings is being that single viewer, looking back.
It has only just occurred to me what I have been painting for the last 5 years. When I first visited India and came across 16 portraits of political agents of the Raj, painting them was a way to get an exhibition together, to get back to India, to be in Udaipur. After 5 years of painting single faces of men I now understand that I am responding to the call by each image I have studied to answer them with my gaze.
My subject became studio portraiture of the 1850s, first the political agents then the Royal Princes, the British Raj officials; always the single (male) figure looking, in his own present time of the sitting, from the past at the lens of his photographer who stands where you and I stand. The men would have been thinking of other viewers, the admiring family, the supplicant, the purchaser, the worshipper, the envious rival.
The visual language of these images is probably typical in its scope of any public portraiture: Fayum and swagger portraits, images of kings, leaders, officials to be shown in public places, mementoes, talismen. On the religious side icons, gods sitting in shrines, rood screens - anywhere that a didactic, expressive one-to-one relationship is being expressed. There is the person looking out, the pose, the clothes, the facial expression, the background, the items sharing the pictorial space. We are overseen by these eyes that follow us.
The single constructed curated image is what interests me. My interest began with reading that Emperor Augustus liked people to shield their eyes from his gaze so they were not scorched. This power of the gaze to transfix and speak to the beholder is what mostly interests me, and because it assumes a living relationship between viewer and viewed.
I’m specially interested in the ‘active’ gaze between image and viewer, ‘Darshan’ in Indian theology in which there is living spiritual exchange between image and viewer. This must have applied to Christian portraits too, hence the eyes of saints and angels scratched out of any church you care to visit by Reformation iconoclasts, blinding the images and taking away their power to communicate through their eyes.
So what I'm doing with my paintings is being that single viewer, looking back.
