#5. Wedding photo (aka "The Queen is dead")
The giclee print for sale on the site called “Wedding photo” was published in an article titled “The Queen is dead; thoughts on family inspired by a game old bird”.
The sketched out ideas for “Wedding photo” are long lost, only the final drawing remains, but I was able to track down resources for some of the images in the painting. The baby’s face was recycled from a previous commission. A couple of years previously a lifestyle magazine called Men’s Health asked me to produce a series of small black and white graphic icons to run alongside an article about unusual sexual fetishes or practices. The baby is suppose to look surprised because the paragraph for which it was used as an icon was about men who seek out sexual partners who lactate, the rest I will leave to your imagination.
The week before this illustration was printed Queen Marie Jose of Italy died aged 94, although she had only ruled as Queen for a couple of months before Italy abandoned the monarchy. She had a life well lived, a stridently independent and eccentric chain smoker, piano player and painter, she plotted against Mussolini while supporting the resistance movement, and is quoted to have said how she wished she had a gun when she met Hitler so she could have dispatched him to his maker. The writer remarks that there is a degree of fascination about people who are born into a family and role which was not asked for. For all the wealth and influence Royalty possess he believes our fascination with them lies in observing how they manage to deal with life in a goldfish bowl. Although, almost everyone has to deal with the “accident” that is family and all that goes with it.
He goes on to talk about one of his favourite photographs, a group picture of his parents on their wedding day surrounded by relatives and ponders the lives that lay ahead for the faces staring back at him. One of his Grandmothers was to die horrifically when her house burnt down around her, a cousin made her fortune in the u.s.a., another became an author, an uncle died of alcoholism, while nine months after the photo was taken the writer was born!
Since this weeks article was simply a gentle straight forward piece on reminiscing it was obvious to use the idea of the photograph, but I didn’t want to just replicate an old imagined wedding photo in my illustrative style so the idea of indicating their future lives was prompted by a map from an old school geography book where one end of a line points to a area on the map while the other end of the line shows a picture, enclosed in a circle, of wildlife, industry or geographical features to be found at that location. Most of the figure in the painting are made up, but the woman standing to our left of the bride is recalled from a drawing I made which included my grandmother (a detail of which can be seen to the left), and the girl with her hands behind her back was inspired by a cutting I had pinned to my drawing board of Hope Sandoval from her Mazzy Star days.
