I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you
A few years ago, I attended a course at Heatherley’s taught by John Dobbs. He did a thing with some stuffed animals that cemented in my mind the understanding that you need to look and see what you are looking at – you need to understand what the objects, the scene, the people are saying. In the case of the stuffed animals, it was about their character.
When I paint what I am looking at, the character of the objects, THE CHARACTERS, helps me to tell their story so that my viewers and I can bring our experience to them in a way that creates meaning.
The blue cat and the sausage dog have a relationship that goes beyond their proximity, their colour, their surroundings. They don’t look exactly like what I was looking at, but once I understood them they helped me to declare themselves.
The title comes from a line in a letter Vita Sackville West wrote to Virginia Woolf, the words around the line I chose:
‘I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.’
A few years ago, I attended a course at Heatherley’s taught by John Dobbs. He did a thing with some stuffed animals that cemented in my mind the understanding that you need to look and see what you are looking at – you need to understand what the objects, the scene, the people are saying. In the case of the stuffed animals, it was about their character.
When I paint what I am looking at, the character of the objects, THE CHARACTERS, helps me to tell their story so that my viewers and I can bring our experience to them in a way that creates meaning.
The blue cat and the sausage dog have a relationship that goes beyond their proximity, their colour, their surroundings. They don’t look exactly like what I was looking at, but once I understood them they helped me to declare themselves.
The title comes from a line in a letter Vita Sackville West wrote to Virginia Woolf, the words around the line I chose:
‘I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.’
A few years ago, I attended a course at Heatherley’s taught by John Dobbs. He did a thing with some stuffed animals that cemented in my mind the understanding that you need to look and see what you are looking at – you need to understand what the objects, the scene, the people are saying. In the case of the stuffed animals, it was about their character.
When I paint what I am looking at, the character of the objects, THE CHARACTERS, helps me to tell their story so that my viewers and I can bring our experience to them in a way that creates meaning.
The blue cat and the sausage dog have a relationship that goes beyond their proximity, their colour, their surroundings. They don’t look exactly like what I was looking at, but once I understood them they helped me to declare themselves.
The title comes from a line in a letter Vita Sackville West wrote to Virginia Woolf, the words around the line I chose:
‘I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.’