House and Family

House and Family is a pretty vast painting in the middle  of a triptych that celebrates the love and loss of bringing up my own children over the expanse of 15 years with their Mum Martha. Even though it is painted flat, in each painting I have tried to get to the essence of each, of Charlie, Cecilia and Elsie as, in this painting, they start to be aware of their lives in the ascendency. Charlie is off to sixth form college, and the girls have  confidence that leads to a social life without us. As parents we are still quite central to providing shelter and food and support, and a taxi service, and I am still reading to Elsie most nights, but life is on the turn. As in the painting, our centrality to their lives is receding. They take up the front of the picture plain, while we slip back slightly behind them. 

 I also wanted the house to be a bit like an idealised picture of home that a young child might paint. In this case though it’s my dream of cohesion, idealisation, and I hope a distillation of a quiet  love in the background. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop writes about this matriarchal framework in her poem Filling Station, a subtle melancholic understatement of a woman’s presence behind all the forward momentum of her husband and sons working in a family petrol station out in the boondocks. I was also thinking of Matisse’s poignant painting of his family from 1911. How do I do this and make it of now I remember thinking. -TH