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Home » Gallery » Painting » Claerwen James

2004 Catalogue: Note by Allison Pearson

Gallery

  • Painting
    • Olly and Suzi
    • Claerwen James
      • Girl in Pink Laughing
      • Alice Liddell
      • Study of Hester in Blue
      • Young Girl Long Dead
      • Girl Looking Straight Out
      • Girl in black looking at a ring
      • Girl in black with white collar
      • Girl in blue against yellow
      • Girl with pale skin and dark eyes
      • Sisters in white
      • Girl, 10
      • Note 2004, Allison Pearson
      • Essay 2006, Francis Spufford
      • Essay 2008, Rachel Cooke
      • Essay 2010, Anthony Lane
    • Laura Smith
    • Ophelia Redpath
    • John Olsen
    • Margaret Olley
    • Jeffrey Smart
    • Henry Whysall
    • Geneviève Seillé
    • Albert Herbert
    • Sarah Raphael
  • Photography
  • Sculpture
  • Video Art
  • Short Films
  • Bande dessinée
  • Cartoons

For Claerwen James in her recent work, an apparent simplicity is the way forward to a new intensity. At first glance, these portraits of children and adolescents offer their subjects up in a direct, even vibrant way. A longer look reveals withdrawal; there is a disconcerting watchfulness about the figures as they stare out of the picture into a future they cannot comprehend. However hard we look at them, we cannot hope to match their questioning gaze. They are held between the plain colours of a backdrop and the flatness of their own costume, which sits on them like the cut-out clothes of paper dolls. The photographic source of the image is acknowledged, and only intensifies the sense of distance: the subjects are taken not from life, but, like icons, from the image of a life. The effect is both to make them more particular, even lonely, and also universal: the child in time.

These paintings communicate the profound strangeness of childhood, its unknowingness and its fears, which go unarticulated because the subject has no language in which to express them. Children live in another country, and these remarkable portraits are landscapes of that foreign terrain.

Allison Pearson
(Girl looking straight out)

 

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