Image/Sound/Text:
Reignited Memories - Ellen Terry as Lady Mcbeth.
Art has always played a significant role in my life. Being in the position and a place that enables me to look at my past and analyze it to some degree has enabled me to see how significant art has always been for me. Important by the way I have lived my life, used it to help me through situations, used it to understand, to learn to appreciate, care, to allow my imagination to take me wherever it cared to go. In analyzing the important role art has played in my life, I am constantly taken back to my past, back to my father. It is here that something significant occurred that has molded the way in which I view art. In considering this further I believe influences, stories and images that have been passed down to me by my father, the influence he has had on me in turn has influenced the way in which I view art. Taking this concept and looking at the way my son views art I can also see distinct influences that he has taken from me that shapes the way he views art.
This painting by John Singer Sargent that I have chosen to comment on has a relationship to my identity, history, my culture, and me. Its position within the Tate gives me the opportunity to be able to examine its cultural connections to myself and also to go beyond these and reconstitute my position by truly looking at what it is I really see as cultural connections to this painting. The painting itself is the representation of a lady (actress) who played the Scottish would be kings, wife, and in this the artist has purposely created the image based on Scottish symbolism. He has used primary colours together with plats and given Lady Macbeth long red hair, all very Scottish /Celtic, She raises a golden crown over her head as the mark of king ship.
Together these things, maybe to the artist, a tribute to drama and his artistic skill, however the symbolism carries with it the connotations of Scotland and kings of lost heritage and suppression, of a nation and its tribal culture now reduced to the imaginary glories of the past and its original identity now a thing of folklore and tourist attractions. How ever within the Tate it is the only image that I was completely drawn to, firstly to its Celtic ornate carved frame but also to its colours. Also the irony of the Scottish play written by an English man and the painting being done by a Italian/American.
My own background is brought in to focus by the fact that my heritage is somewhat blighted, there is not so heroic and epic nation that was once the Celtic nation, but in reality, it is as the painting, a collection of beautiful representations that go to idealise what it is I am meant to be –Irish. On reflection my son (Rhys) who I hope I am passing down all the Celtic things that I should be has now reached a point in which I have realised that he is now growing in to a independent human being who point of view is that of his own and no matter what I have done in the past he WILL grow up to his own person and not alone will he have some of the traits passed on by me but also he will have the traits of growing up in London –his friends , school, tv, culture. I must learn to let him go. Even though the painting harks back to the idealised past it still has strong references to culture to day,
