Meloncholy
The painting is based on an image of a pot-holder that would have hung in a kitchen The title ‘Meloncholy’ is a play on words in connection to the visual depiction of a melon. I wanted to make a connection between part of what is being seen (the melon) and the inherent sadness of the image I was drawn to the way the large melancholic eyes are depicted looking sideways, as they also do in the objects represented in ‘Willow Weep for Me (2011), and ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (2009). What interests me about this, is that it not only enables the viewer to look or become a voyeur without the return of gaze, but it may suggest an idea of looking or adverting ones gaze from horror. Some people have told me they find it difficult to look at my paintings that depict such images. Watermelons regularly feature in stereotyped and negative images, utilising the idea that the black workers that picked cotton in the fields would be given watermelon as well as their being given to those travelling on the slave ships (the watermelon is believed to have originated in southwest Africa There are a few ideas and quotes that interest me in relation to my paintings that appropriate stereotyped black figurines; these help me articulate what is a difficult subject. One quote is from Slavoj Zizek’s book Violence, in which he uses a well-known anecdote: “a German officer visited Picasso in his studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist ‘chaos’ of the painting, asked Picasso: ‘Did you do this?’ Picasso calmly replied: ‘No, you did this!”. This quote suggests and puts forward the idea that the horror present in Picasso’s Guernica is a representation of someone else’s violence. This is a position I take with the stereotyped figures; the depiction and violence comes from, not my own ideologies, but those of a brutal, insulting and violent history. Again the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in an interview suggests, “I do think it would be good to be educated to value conflict and to distrust violence … anything that abolishes the idea that there are always at least two points of view, is going to end in violence”. My input to the inherent violence in stereotyped images is to suggest a conflict and to, in some way dispel violence by creating the other point of view, Phillips talks about. This can be achieved by using craft, detail and labour, to add a sense of beauty to what is quick and brash