Myself as other

I want to thank Katty for inviting me to participate on this site. I am very pleased to be here for two reasons, both of equal importance - to return to the South African art scene, which I miss now that I am an expatriate, and because Ansisters is about nurturing the woman artist. Being a mother of a two-and-a-half year old, and at the same time painting with an renewed excitement and commitment, this is very pertinent to me. My art is feminist, although not in a particularly conscious way. I don't strive to be anything, really, other than as good as I can be and to paint people, usually from my imagination, with myself as the model most of the time. The figures are generally female and have a definite womanliness. They are also often strong, powerful figures - more so than I intended - and sometimes there is an ambiguity of gender, which is also unintended. This presents the female figure as both feminine and masculine, re-evaluating and championing her traditional roles but suggesting that she had a choice to be what she is. The titles and story in my paintings come after the painting has got underway, and when I am convinced by the life of the figure and the reality of the character. My paintings are fictions that allow me to recreate myself as other.

Self-portrait with Migraine, 32" x 32", oil on canvas, 2005

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I have been drawing and painting my whole life, inspired initially by my artist and poet mother. I am reading a lot of Willa Cather at the moment and am inspired by the way she describes the American land. She simplifies and amplifies the colours and forms in a beautifully painterly way, and she has many similarities with Winslow Homer, who is another American great whose work I am avidly pouring over these days. I love his ability to put down passages of paint without hesitation or fussiness, and express his vision in such an immediate way. I am striving to achieve that kind of directness in my own work, as I am finding these days that the best things happen after hours, days, weeks of frustration, when I am finally fluid in my brushstrokes, and have realised what it is about the subject that I want to paint.

South African Woman, 40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2006

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I want to read Robert Henri again as he pushes the idea of painting without considering the results i.e. painting from feeling, instinct rather than the intellect. However, I am not sure all his efforts really work, do they? Or do they? (The last couple of sentences was stolen from Stephen Fry's "Bright Young Things" - a wonderful film.)

Self-portrait as Shelmerdine, 46" x 24", oil on canvas, 2006

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I painted a work based on a Woolf character called "Self-portrait as Shelmardine". I am fascinated by a surreality in certain paintings such as some of Degas' works, and also Balthus, Hopper. The American writer, Truman Capote's early work is so wonderfully strange - Other Voices, Other Rooms, for example. Together with the slightly mesmerising quality of mid-summer heat in certain US states it makes for highly powerful imagery. "Self-portrait as Shelmardine" was originally inspired by this book. I was simply painting a self-portrait at the time I was reading the Other Voices, Other Rooms, but not at all thinking of them in relation to one another. But then the figure took on the character of my imagined Randolf, a character in Other Voices, Other Rooms. I thought since the Capote film had just come out it would seem too obviously inspired by that, so instead I thought I would do Virginia Woolf's Orlando. I've wanted to that for a while. But, again, it seemed somewhat obvious, so the mysterious Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine it had to be. (In Orlando I loved the part where Orlando sat under a tree for a number of years before she wrote her poem, "The Oak Tree" just because she had to sit and grow. Some of Willa Cather's characters do that too, before embarking on their creative careers.) So my picture is really about Orlando, not Shelmerdine, and in truth, it's simply a response to wonderful early American writing and coming to grips with the country I am living in at present through the vividness and originality of their vision, as are all my current works.

Figure in Blue Hat, 36" x 24", oil on canvas, 2006

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My painting is becoming more and more an unhindered expression of the joy of living, working, mothering and being a wife,daughter and sister; experiencing great visual art, great writing and music; living through seasons; experiencing the dry, treeless Californian hills outside our back door - really just an expression of exhilaration.

Thomasin Dewhurst
www.thomasindewhurst.com

Posted 16 January 2007, www.face.org.za, author: Thomasin Dewhurst.