Portraits depicting Narrative
"Truth of the matter was, stories was everything, and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked: a right way and a way that was not so right". Harry Crews
Point at a Deer and Call it a Horse
He shuts his eyes as cotton wool balls are thrown at his face. Based on the Asch Conformity Experiments.
In the basic Asch paradigm it can be demonstrated that the power of conformity in groups is fairly immediate. If nearly everybody agrees that something that’s wrong is now right, it is almost impossible to stand alone with a dissenting voice. 1 Metre Square Canvas in Acrylics.
Portrait of my little brother, ex Marine Adams PO47842-J (554 Troop, 40 Commando)
1 Metre Square Canvas in Acrylics. December 2009-January 2010.
Jameson (Jamie) Adams served in the Royal Marines Commando Brigade.
The portrait is formulaic, eyes deliberately penetrating the viewer. The stare is charged with challenge and contempt.
Bildungsroman Boy: History Repeating Itself
1 Metre Square Canvas in Acrylics. December 2009. Portrait of the young man about town, Andrew Brown.
A Bildungsroman tells about the growing up or coming of age of a sensitive person who is looking for answers and experience. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest son going out in the world to seek his fortune. Usually in the beginning of the story there is an emotional loss which makes the protagonist leave on his journey. In a Bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and he is ultimately accepted into society – the protagonist’s mistakes and disappointments are over.
A Bildungsroman is, most generally, the story of a single individual’s growth and development within the context of a defined social order. The growth process, at its roots a quest story, has been described as both “an apprenticeship to life” and a “search for meaningful existence within society.”
To spur the hero or heroine on to their journey, some form of loss or discontent must jar them at an early stage away from the home or family setting.
The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes between the protagonist’s needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order.
Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who is then accommodated into society. The novel ends with an assessment by the protagonist of himself and his new place in that society.
Cat on a corrugated-tin Roof
The character of a house symbolising the story within.
Portrait of a house on a hill. Afternoon sun hitting it full-frontal. Storm clouds brewing… This is where Rachael Adams grew up. This is the home where her mother and step-father fought with an atrocious passion. This is the home that they fled. This is where a cloud of mental illness hovered. It’s where she and her brothers were happiest. It’s where they were saddest. It’s now the A4146.
Orpheus Descending & The Lady of Shalott
Orpheus Descending: the Tennessee Williams play, which was made into the film The Fugitive Kind.
Lady Torrance in The Fugitive Kind; passionate, tortured and cursed by the conventions of a narrow-minded society. Equally based on The Lady of Shalott - the Victorian ballad by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side – The Lady of Shalott submits and lays herself down, with the drama of a Gone with the Wind Scorched Earth Policy unfolding in the background. As Tara is threatened with burning, the creative working-class woman, imprisoned by child-rearing and a conventional society, wastes years barricaded indoors, watching the Starling Moot swoop overhead…
Artist Notes and Themes:
The domestic interior/exterior: Home.
Intrigued by the secret places in our society. People and their affairs. Secret and purely private settings exposed. Using familiar aspects of ordinary life, documenting it in pictures and undertaking a representational history. A compulsion to record events that were over long ago or happening now. The ability to turn back the years, images literally taken from memory. Using the figure (myself, you as me, our circumstances) objectively.
‘The English at Home’ (Bill Brandt). ref. Plucking details / events / moods / worries and giving them the weight that applies in the domestic world. Housewifery; the lack of respect for it and child-rearing.
The virtues of detatchment. Intimacy. Familiarity can be blinding; but the sense of action being suddenly frozen into a document of history gives it an apparent weight.
To co-ordinate ordinary objects, actions, characters and transmute them all together into a pattern, a dramatic creation.
To present the images as in a film or play in which one is at the same time actor and infinitely detatched spectator.
To notice the detail, the mundane activity, all existing at one remove, yet with a closeness and meaning usually unwarranted.
All should unfold itself not haphazard but as it must, with complex inevitability.
To use pictures (chronicling the vast terrain of the domestic world) in a series. The sequential views of a scene or place following in the most intimate, troubling way, the reality of how we age. Progress. Demise. Pictures confirming reality in casual fragments. But since life is not about significant details, the series is used to prove the succession of time / change. To expose what people hide, because they are ashamed, or without confidence.
One still image is intrinsically misleading, allowing one to linger over a single moment. A series of work shown in sequence can be seen as a full expression, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. Allegorical.
“There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.” Charles Dickens
