All of the work in this exhibition is the product of living and
working with collections of photographic images. The paintings are
attempts to explore my relationship with those images and develop my
understanding of them. The subjects come form my working life over
the past few years, which has involved researching for exhibitions
and the redevelopment of The Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, and the
illustration of a Graphic History book on the history of the Nevada
Test Site.
Nevada Paintings
In 2007 I came across the book 100 Suns
by Michael Light of archive images of atomic testing in the desert
and at sea carried out by the US. It was suggested to me that the
colourful images of explosions could be a subject for painting, but I
was drawn instead to the images of people sitting watching these
tests in shorts, shirts, desert boots, and a pair of thick back
goggles. I had to try drawing these, and completed about half a dozen
pictures on this theme. I posted them on my blog and moved on to
subjects closer to home, painting my friends and local situations. In
2011, Andy Kirk, history professor in Las Vegas, Nevada, contacted me
about using some of those testing images in a lecture. A year later
he got in touch again to ask if I would be interested in working on a
book on the history of the test site.
We are now in the middle of
producing that book which will be published by Oxford University
Press in 2015. That has meant that I have spent many hours looking at
and drawing from archive photographs from all aspects of atomic
testing, but the ones of people watching still had the strongest lure
as painting subjects, alongside the surreal 'Doomtown' images of
houses and mannequins that were placed at distance from the
detonation to analyse the effects of atomic explosions on domestic
materials. In 2013 I had an exhibition of my 'Test Site Studies' at
the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.
Bedford Paintings
My work researching and curating displays at The Higgins introduced
me to the fantastic resource of social history photographs within the
collection and also some of those held by the record office, BLARS.
Initially I was taken by the photographs of airships that I
encountered while working on the R100 & R101 exhibition in 2010
and the painting of R34 at New York dates from that time.
Later, as the redevelopment of The Higgins was under way I researched
many different areas as I helped the team develop new displays. I
loved the photographic collections and would spend my time exploring
them looking for images of collectors or old Bedford. Some images
would jump out at me, such as The May Queen, which ended up
becoming a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy this summer (not
on display here), and The Lacemaker (before she married the
collector of folk songs), both
painted in 2013. I didn't know much about these images but the
process of painting is a process of developed looking and can inform
in other ways. Knowing the name of the subject only tells one so
much, and when confronted with these images we instinctively explore
them for meaning. The Lacemaker is
based on a photo from the 1950s of a woman who, still alive today, is
involved with lace making, and the photograph accompanied other
donations to the Higgins collections.
The pictures in the exhibition are
mostly to do with the R101 disaster, the R34 – the first airship to
cross the Atlantic – which flew from Cardington in 1919, and there
are two pictures dating from the First World War, of those I know the
names, and would love to know the stories of those people. For me
these paintings explore the distance between those times and now, and
the unknowable in every image: what happened immediately before, or
after? What were they thinking? How were they feeling? Were that
married couple in The Wedding Portrait separated
by the horrors in the trenches?
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