The Album

 

I decided to focus on painting from the family album as I felt the photographs in themselves held more meaning.

 

Reading Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida  and Susan Sontag, On Photography further encouraged me to investigate the influence and relationship of the photograph to the painting.

 

My family escaped Europe during World War II and I have a vast collection of images of known and unknown family members, mixed up with photographs from the decades leading up to the present. They immediately conjured up for me distant memories, traces of lost identities and feelings of loss and longing. There was a nostalgia surrounding the photos, and an idea of continuity and immortality. They were triggers for lost or forgotten narratives and evidence for lives lived. The photographs were tangible reminders of absence and presence.

 

Whitney McVeigh examines nostalgia and echoes of human memory in her multi media practice.

 

Researching from Yesterday’s Self, Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity  Andreea Ceciu Ritivoi   and   The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal  and The Future Of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym  threw up ideas of our attitudes to the past and how it shapes us and our modern interpretations of nostalgia.

 

Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting opens with the manipulation of a photograph for political propaganda, altering the memories surrounding a political event. Stalin also edited images with the intent of rewriting history.

 

I was very influenced by the monotone paintings of Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, and their use of the photograph. I read further about these artists, in particular enjoying Gerhard Richter: Portraits and Luc Tuymans SFMOMA

 

I wanted to paint these images as I am fascinated by the transformative, manipulative and distancing potential of the painted image. The paintings retain the information from the photographic source material but are given a differing authority and the idea of longevity and the legacy inherent in painting practice.