Over the years I’ve kept mostly away from figure painting. Not sure why. I’ve done images of people in light-hearted work, such as cartoon-style water-colours to record travels. But lately I’ve wanted to summon the human figure onto canvas, and these ones have come out to play.
I’m still figuring out (yes, Cloudy, that’s a pun) who these people are. I’ve heard fiction writers say they don’t control what their characters do. They put them on the page and wait to see what happens. This feels a bit like that. These figures seemed to arrive of their own accord. The images all started with the figures as sketches, and the rooms they occupy emerged from there.
Are all characters facets of the author? Maybe. These figures are all women, so that’s a clue perhaps. Another is that they inhabit the kinds of spaces I’ve been painting for years. They seem to possess the bowls and vases and flowers of a hundred still life compositions I’ve done in my life.
The figures all wanted to be busy. It’s true the seated woman — who is to me particularly mysterious — isn’t doing anything. But she has a look of calm readiness about her, as though her work is all recently done, and that something interesting is about to happen in this energetic space she occupies. It’s like she has arranged a still life for me to paint and then sat in the middle of it, as if to say, “Here I am.”
