A portrait is normally a depiction of a particular subject and their personality. However, in this series of works, the recurring subject (the artist’s partner, acclaimed concert pianist Simon Tedeschi) takes on different guises, poses and expressions so as to convey different states, ideas and moods in the artist’s own life. As such, he is her proxy.
‘As we are both artists, we have this miraculous and rare existence together. Both each other’s willing audience and critic, our relationship is punctuated by the type of understanding and fragility that at times nears pure reflectiveness, like a mirror. This collection of works, whilst of me, is not about me, but about her – her triumphs, despairs, self-doubt, artistic maturation and life changes that I am both witness to and in many cases, a proxy of.’
Simon Tedeschi, on being painted by the artist
A portrait is normally a depiction of a particular subject and their personality. However, in this series of works, the recurring subject (the artist’s partner, acclaimed concert pianist Simon Tedeschi) takes on different guises, poses and expressions so as to convey different states, ideas and moods in the artist’s own life. As such, he is her proxy.
The series developed out of a relentless compulsion to return to the same subject time and again. In a relatively short space of time, the artist created study after study of the subject’s face – some haunted and drawn, some appropriating literary characters, some abstract – but all of them a portrait of where she was at a particular point in her artistic career and life.
Drawing parallels with Francis Bacon’s obsession with Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent - an exercise which grew and mutated into a series less about the original painting, and more about Bacon and the dark meanderings of his own mind and self-image – Proxy questions the illusory nature of identification and the line between intimacy and engulfment.
“It is said that the face is the mirror of the mind. “
St. Jerome
‘As we are both artists, we have this miraculous and rare existence together. Both each other’s willing audience and critic, our relationship is punctuated by the type of understanding and fragility that at times nears pure reflectiveness, like a mirror. This collection of works, whilst of me, is not about me, but about her – her triumphs, despairs, self-doubt, artistic maturation and life changes that I am both witness to and in many cases, a proxy of.’
Simon Tedeschi, on being painted by the artist
A portrait is normally a depiction of a particular subject and their personality. However, in this series of works, the recurring subject (the artist’s partner, acclaimed concert pianist Simon Tedeschi) takes on different guises, poses and expressions so as to convey different states, ideas and moods in the artist’s own life. As such, he is her proxy.
The series developed out of a relentless compulsion to return to the same subject time and again. In a relatively short space of time, the artist created study after study of the subject’s face – some haunted and drawn, some appropriating literary characters, some abstract – but all of them a portrait of where she was at a particular point in her artistic career and life.
Drawing parallels with Francis Bacon’s obsession with Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent - an exercise which grew and mutated into a series less about the original painting, and more about Bacon and the dark meanderings of his own mind and self-image – Proxy questions the illusory nature of identification and the line between intimacy and engulfment.
“It is said that the face is the mirror of the mind. “
St. Jerome
