In November I drove through the Surrey Downs, awash with autumnal reds and browns, for my first meeting with Alice Strickland. Things got off to a hairy start when I backed into a parked car while looking for Alice’s house. The damage to my car was minimal, but to the other one considerable. I left my number on the windscreen and turned up at Alice’s door with adrenaline pumping.
At times during this project I’ve almost learned to enjoy driving. Visiting the authors at their homes meant spending a lot of time in the car by myself. I travelled on beautiful scenic routes, got through some fantastic audiobooks, and experienced the four seasons on the road. Sometimes I enjoyed just losing myself in the mesmerising white noise of the engine. Still, as my little accident on Alice’s street reminded me, there’s a reason I always hated driving and tried to avoid it.
Alice is a curator for the National Trust in London and the Southeast. Her doctorate focused on British woman artists of the Second World War, and in her book on the painter and printmaker Laura Knight, she offers a fresh look at a figure whose importance has not been fully appreciated.
I found Alice in the midst of an all-consuming motherhood, welcoming me at the door with her twenty month-old daughter, Helena, sleeping in her arms. Looking down the passage into the house, I saw two pugs barking and jumping excitedly behind a safety gate. Despite being thus occupied Alice was considerate enough to calm my nerves over the car accident. After glancing at a photo she assured me the damage wasn’t too bad, and it was an old car in any case.
Seeing Alice at the outset of her journey as a mother unleashed a flood of memories and emotions in me. I recalled a line from Ann Truit I read in my twenties and never forgot: “motherhood has been as central to my life as a stove is central to a household in the freeze of winter.” The cruel irony of it hit home again. After so many years struggling to be productive and creative while raising children, I felt totally bereft when they all grew up, and sensed my life’s purpose fade along with their need for parenting.
But there was the sitting to arrange, so there wasn’t too much time for losing myself in reverie. Clearly it wouldn’t be possible for Alice to put the infant Helena down, so she settled into a wicker chair in the corner of her open-plan kitchen, the pugs crowding round to compete for her attention. I liked the assemblage of creaturely forms that the child and dogs brought to the composition. Alice’s polkadot shirt reminded me of the master of polkadots, David Hockney, and especially his superb drawing The Artist’s Mother, 1972.
As usual I made two drawings, and photographed the pugs since they were far too lively to capture with my pencils. I also included a little horse in the passageway behind Alice, which seemed like a natural addition to this world of diminutive figures.
Painting commenced soon afterwards, once I had projected the best drawing onto the canvas and added the two pugs. Alice’s direct gaze created an interesting tension in the image, focusing her attention on the viewer of the painting rather than on the child and the clamouring dogs. The composition resolved itself into a classic pyramid, which is always visually satisfying, but I dithered over how to make use of the surrounding negative space. My first instinct was to leave the canvas bare, but as the painting stood there in the studio inviting my occasional scrutiny I started having second thoughts.
Eight months later Alice was due to come for a second sitting, but had to cancel: Helena was poorly and needed mothering. At this point I decided to add the walls and floors to the portrait, as well as the evocative doorway with the toy horse. I was thinking about Gaston Bachelard’s comment, in The Poetics of Space, that a setting is more than just a scene for works of art: it is often the armature around which the whole work revolves. This is an observation I’ve really come to appreciate during this project. Painting my subjects in their domestic settings has been stimulating in terms of both composition and narrative, suggesting ways to structure the images but also situating the sitters within a tableau of their lives.
The only question now was whether to paint Alice’s face again. During a second sitting, I would no doubt have added more detail and tried for a better likeness, but this process often leaves me feeling like I’ve refined the life out of the portrait. I thought my painting of Alice had the immediacy of my first impressions, which I find at least as valuable as a strong likeness. So I left it be.
