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Yellow Girl, Black Dog, Pink Moonlight

1/6/2018

THE WOLF & THE MOON : A LOVE STORY oil on aluminium 77x102cm 2018

Cancer is as vast and complex an experience as I have ever encountered but I am making some connections that seem worth sharing.

I should make clear that I am not expecting this cancer to kill me, the prognosis is very good, however, having the disease means you have to face the thoughts! 

MOONDOG oil on canvas 2007 Collection of Ms Natalie Shaw

REMEMBERING MY FATHER oil on canvas, 77x77cm, 2003

At three years old, my son Joe, then an only child, considered the notion that he would one day grow up. After some careful questioning and reflection, he concluded that if he were to grow up to be the Daddy, then Daddy would grow down to be the boy. If he was to countenance change, some things had to remain constant!

Our world begins in sensation and interaction, from the mirroring of expression to the discovery of our physical edges. As we learn the vastness and complexity of the world, we engage with imaginative reasoning to make it a place we can understand. We posit theories that connect the known with the unknown; a creative engagement that is rooted in our wonder at the world around us.

It seems to me that preserving our capacity for wonder is one of Life’s crucial tasks, we have to fight the cynicism and disinterest that seeps into our ‘grown up’ state. My own route to self-preservation lies in making images.

As some of you know, I am currently undergoing treatment for cancer. I began this painting THE WOLF & THE MOON - A LOVE STORY (just a snap shot so please allow for picture quality), before my cancer diagnosis, and have been working on it during my recovery from surgery and preparation for chemo. It became significant when a yellow girl and a black dog arrived beneath the wolf’s bed beside a pool of dripping, pink moonlight. They were spontaneous additions, not featured in early drawings. I was happy to remove them if they didn’t fit. However, they didn’t just fit, they completed the painting, making it more than I had planned.

The weird thing about imaginative work is that the connections and meanings you find are curiously hard to hold on to. I had, for example, forgotten that the trio of girl, dog and moon have appeared in my work several times before. How could I forget this, when their arrival in this painting felt so meaningful? Perhaps we have to let go of old significances to learn new ones?

Whatever the case, this re-encounter with my familiar icons made me feel as complete as the picture, and I had my first panic-free thought about sickness and death and this is it:
the world will shift to accommodate my absence. It’s not a bitter thought, I could not feel better loved or supported, nor is it a frightened thought, it's just the way it is. Apart from anything else, what other choice does the world have? This revelation was accompanied by a feeling of such naive, wondering surprise that I was reminded of Joe's reasoning about growing up. Seems like there is always something new to learn.

#Herstory

1/3/2018

I am showing at ILLUMINATE HERSTORY EXHIBITION, an International Women's Day Event with Helen Pankhurst at St Catherine's Hall, Oxford next week.*
Feeling particularly happy to be showing SAINT UNCUMBER, a piece made to raise funds for EAVES Charity for Women, an essential service that supported trafficked women and victims of domestic violence until its funding was cut by the coalition government.

In the middle ages, statues of this bearded woman on a cross, were common in churches all over Europe (there is one in the Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey). HER STORY is that she prayed for a beard to avoid marriage; the beard scared off her suitor, but unfortunately, her father then had her crucified. In his masterly Religion and the Decline of Magic**, Keith Thomas explains how Uncumber became a beacon for women who wanted to rid themselves of husbands. They would lay ears of wheat at her statue as prayers for liberation. A symbol of hope at a time when a woman was her husband's property, I believe that, in these days of gender fluidity and hipster beards, this androgynous icon is due a comeback.

SAINT UNCUMBER Mixed Media

* Illuminate Herstory: https://www.facebook.com/events/1202726563192895/
** Religion and the Decline of Magic https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Religion_and_the_Decline_of_Magic.html?id=yQwSAQAAIAAJ

Artist Interview

22/1/2018

It was a great experience to show such a large body of work in a fantastic space. New connections were also made, hopefully leading to new and exciting collaborations in 2018.

For those of you who missed the December show at Old Diorama Arts Centre, here's a video of the Q&A on Opening Night.

Click to View

Cautionary Tales Exhibition Opens Soon

21/11/2017

An icon is defined as an image worthy of uncritical devotion but uncritical devotion is a dangerous thing.
December 11th is fast approaching. All details on times and events here:
http://www.sirett.com/cautionary-tales-exhibition.html

Embracing Monsters # 1 Weird Sisters

30/5/2017

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Crab Claw Gorgon, ink on paper, 21x 30cm, 2017

Weird Sisters come in threes. The witches upon the heath, the bat-winged Furies, dog-head Harpies, swan-like Graeae and snake-haired Gorgons. These sisters are named Avenger, Jealous, Unresting (Furies), Dread, Horror, Alarm (Graeae), in short, everything and anything that frightens or disturbs; while the gorgan Medusa and her sisters Sthenno and Euryale, are so monstrously ugly that to look upon them is to be petrified.
And, yes, all these monsters are women.

The Greek playwright Aeschylus places the Graeae and the Gorgons on Kisthene’s dreadful plain where ‘neither does the sun with his beams look down upon them, nor ever the nightly moon’*. In fact Weird Sisters never do belong in the community. They are banished from the kingdom to deserts and wastelands; living, like so many outcasts, beyond the pale. People have always preferred to banish 'monsters' and these times are no different to any other, look at Brexiteers' views on EU Freedom of Movement or the ideology of ISIS. It's hard to find any example of modern conflict that lacks the basic (and base) desire to cleanse territories of 'foreign' influences. It’s also hard on the level of the individual human body to find any example of modern concerns that don't equate non-standard appearance with monstrousness. (see January’s Blog).

Medusa's First Kiss, ink on paper, 21x 30cm, 2017

There are ways of looking at and embracing our differences, which is fortunate considering fewer lives are devastated when we're guided by tolerance and inclusivity. It is in this spirit that I have begun a series of new drawings about the Weird Sisters of the plains, imagining them as whole people rather than symbols of all that is fearful, people who might from time to time want to visit new places and try new things. What, for example, might Medusa's first kiss look like? Or the Graeae's first trip to a nightclub?
I am, however, decidedly against moving Medusa and her sisters to the city full time. Psychologically, I don't believe wildernessess are places to avoid or to fear because they are where we exist undisguised, in all our uncertain vulnerability and individual truth. Perhaps in this series, the Belles will visit the outlands while the pariahs go to the ball... I'll keep you posted!

Fish-Tailed Gorgon and The Handerkerchief Tree, ink on paper, 21x 30cm, 2017

Incidentally, I wasn’t sure why I was drawing mythic monsters until I remembered something I read years ago by James Hillman. He describes wildernessess as places where ‘we never learn, cannot help, fall back to and cry from again and again’, as an essential (if uncomfortable) landscape of human experience.**

* Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound C5th B.C.
** James Hillman, Abandoning the Child, LOOSE ENDS, Spring Pubications, 1975

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OTHER BRIDES

10/1/2017

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CHILD BRIDE oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

BARBIE BRIDE detail, oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

BARTERED BRIDE oil & pewter leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

DRAG KING BRIDE oil on wood 41x41cm Natalie Sirett 2016

MISS HAVERSHAM oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

OPHELIA detail oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

MRS. ROCHESTER oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

PERSEPHONE oil & gold leaf on wood 61x76cm Natalie Sirett 2016

In her article Thinner, Smoother Better Rhianon Lucy Cossett reflects on the common although largely unspoken practice of retouching 'selfies' before posting them online. Picture software, now standard on mobile phones, can lighten your skin, slim you down, enlarge your eyes and fade out those blemishes. Girls and young women are making full use of all editing options, creating aspirational, ‘post-truth’ versions of themselves for public consumption. Selfie Culture tends to be viewed as proof of the narcissism of the young, but something more disturbing is at play. Alienation from the actual physical body must occur when falsifying its image is the established norm. On this point, Cossett’s youthful testimony is poignant:
'Those of us who know what it is like to grow up in a culture with a value system that places your body above all else will know just how much energy this preoccupation expends – how it bleeds away at your ability to act in the real world, to achieve things.'

Hollowed-out beauties in fairytales are the women who win. Smooth-skinned, correctly proportioned girls capture princes’ hearts and become the bride. They receive love, social status and the victory of being chosen above, and envied by, all others. The selfie-manipulator may have similar goals in mind but if your beauty is rated by public consensus, there’s little hope of ever gaining autonomy and, as increasing incidence of eating disorders and self-harm demonstrates, it is getting harder for girls to cope with the threshold into their adult bodies. For our girls to have a chance of manifesting unashamedly in the world the obsessive judgement of their bodies needs to stop and we know this! We know that life is a complex and substantial business that takes so much more than a well-cultivated facade to live well, yet beauty and happiness continue to be conflated, making beauty a girl’s heart’s desire.

Thinking around and along these lines, I began this series of portraits: THE BRIDES. I started with flawless, feminine effigies The Barbie Doll and The Madonna but soon found myself getting interested in the less-than-fairytale narratives of brides including Miss Haversham, Ophelia and Mrs. Rochester, all three abandoned and unchosen. Persephone, the girl compelled by her appetites to live half her life in darkness, also became a subject. Other paintings feature child brides and bartered brides. Twin portraits show a drag king bride distancing from her femininity while a drag queen bride yearns towards his. The portraits themselves are intentionally schematic in style. Subjects sit rigidly, within patterned frames or areas of polished metal leaf, reminiscent of early icon paintings of saints and martyrs. The aim is to make portraits that have a universal or iconic quality.

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June 19th, 2016

19/6/2016

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Political Grace: Imran Qureshi at the Barbican Curve

11/6/2016

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Where the Shadows are so Deep, 2015, Acrylic on floor and wall with 35 paintings, gouache and gold leaf on wasli and paper

Imran Qureshi
Where the Shadows are so Deep
18 February 2016 - 10 July 2016
The Curve, Barbican

Floor detail

Where the Shadows are so Deep by Imran Qureshi, leads the viewer on a theatrical, multi-sensory journey. Exquisitely painted miniature landscapes, lit by spotlights, hang at varying levels along a huge, curved corridor. The further you walk, the darker the space becomes. It is only once the eyes adjust that you become aware of red spillages underfoot and on the walls. They suggest pools of blood until closer examination reveals petals blooming out of the gore. These flowering motifs are sometimes referred to by Qureshi as 'blessings on the land'. It is a particular experience to step on them, around them.
Approaching the luminous miniatures, made with acrylic and gold leaf on traditional wasli paper, we find landscapes, populated by trees and flowers; each designed with a curved horizon-line echoing the curve of the space. On a technical level, these paintings are very fine. Qureshi underwent rigorous training in traditional 16th Century miniaturist techniques at the National College of Arts in Lahore.

In contrast to the discovery of flowers that mitigates our encounter with the blood stains, viewing these landscapes (referred to by almost every reviewer as 'jewel-like') becomes more and more unsettling. Little things are wrong. They are not the idylls they appear to be. Some contain tiny flurries of blurred marks, others are presented with the gum-stripped edges where the artist tests his paint still visible. The natural events depicted have potentially sinister outcomes; those vines that twist so elegently around a trunk, may eventually choke the tree. What are those patches of withered branches? Why are those roots exposed?

In an interview accompanying the show, the artist speaks of the 'idea of landscape which is full of life...nobody knows, within a second, just by a little act of terror... it transforms.' Qureshi's work often references the political situation in Pakistan but his intention is not to make work parading brutalities, rather he seeks to name the universal presence of violence. As he explains, “...there’s a lot of violence around me in Pakistan, but then there is a lot of violence all over the world. Violence is not a strange thing or a stranger for anyone."* In Where the Shadows are so Deep, we find life as well as darkness even in the deepest shadows of The Curve. Qureshi's achievement is that he communicates so much more about the nature of violence because it is shot through with such shimmering beauty. It is an extraordinary achievement AND it's there until July 10th. Don't miss it.
* read more

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Tales We Tell Our Daughters

27/4/2016

I have just finished painting a series inspired by the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, ASCHENPUTTEL. In this pre-Disney telling it is a wishing tree growing from the mother's grave, and not a 'Fairy Godmother' that provides Cinders with the requisite clothing to attract her prince. Cinder's wicked stepmother and sisters are not ugly; they are 'fair of face but black of heart'. In the final contest to win the prince's hand, one sister cuts off a toe, the other her heel as they try to squeeze into that fragile, transparent glass slipper. The fight to fit the shoe closely parallels our contemporary zeal for cutting and shrinking our bodies through diets, cosmetic procedures and other, darker compulsions. The correct size = happy ever after - doesn't it?

These tales we tell our daughters contain some monstrous female stereotypes. Good mothers are usually dead while stepmothers will stop at nothing to remove the competition of a stepdaughter. An early version of Snow White casts the murderous queen as the girl's actual mother, while in Charles Perrault's extra gory version, the queen salts, cooks and eats the wild boar's lungs and liver, she believes belonged to her stepchild. Women who are not compliant, young, virginal, beautiful and of the requisite size, appear as witches, harridans and crones. If motherhood hasn't killed them off it turns them to jealousy, dissatisfaction and wickedness; a metamorphosis that surely informs our modern infatuation with youth and the hiding of signs of aging on the body and childbirth on the body at all costs.

In Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, Karen is punished for her vanity in wearing red shoes to church. The shoes weld to her feet, dancing her through night and day into a graveyard where she sees an angel guarding the church doors. "Dance you shall!" he told her. "Dance in your red shoes until you are pale and cold, and your flesh shrivels down to the skeleton. Dance you shall from door to door, and wherever there are children proud and vain you must knock at the door till they hear you, and are afraid of you. Dance you shall. Dance always."

The angel here highlights another requirement: beauty should exist without pride or vanity. To the long list of acceptability criteria, a girl must add modesty, natural grace and, I would suggest, a bird-like appetite - unless she is providing for the appetites of others*, to the list of qualities necessary to be a woman deserving of a happy ending.
* See August Blog The Two Faces of Eve

Into the Mystic

24/1/2016

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BP: A Walk Through British Art at Tate Britain covers 500 years of British home-grown talent. I'm not sure that I've ever felt, or wanted to feel, particularly British but, as I wandered from room to room, I was surprised to discover that I was looking for something, a common characteristic that is reflected in my own practice.

I'd be surprised if there's much academic consensus over what defines British Art. When I studied Art History, schools of French, Italian and German Art seemed to have much clearer national characteristics. However, this might be due to my outsider perspective. At the Tate, the aspect that resonated most strongly was a sense of mysticism, especially in paintings of landscapes and narratives.This quality is by no means universal but it is there in a significant minority of British artist's work: Samuel Palmer, William Blake, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Joan Eardley, to name but a few. Fondness for the fantastic isn't confined to the visual arts scene. It's there in literature too, in folk tales, illustration, film making and music.

Van Morrison himself, who provided me with the title to this blog: Into the Mystic (if you don't know it have a listen), is a Belfast Boy. It's oddly comforting to feel, as I paint my fairy tales, that I may be rooted in some kind of native tradition!

Exhibitions: You can still catch my work on show at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh until next Sunday, February 14th.

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