What Remains of Her

Pontone Gallery is delighted to introduce a new artist to their roster and mount this exciting exhibition of his recent work. Sam Jackson paints pictures of Queens, Princesses, and similar women of historical note. From Cleopatra to Boudicca to Queen Victoria, via Ann Boleyn, Catherine de Medici and Marie Antoinette, Jackson showers us with a multitude of portraits of various female dignitaries selected from the Western canon. Apart from their sex, the one thing they have in common is that they cannot be painted from life. These are creative conjurings of likeness, derived from secondary sources, folk tale and the artist’s imagination. The compositions of the paintings are uniform and unwavering in their description of head and shoulders. It is interesting to compare this rigorous format with that of the seventeenth century stylings of Godfrey Kneller’s ‘Kit Kat Club’ portraits. Similarly of consistent size and pose, however, these were exclusively of important and influential contemporary male luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Sir John Vanbrugh and William Congreve. Jackson’s cohort operates as something of a romantic counterweight to such a definitive and rather austere fraternity. The artist’s handling is loose, cursive and naïvely bold. His lively application evokes something of the illustrator’s art in its energy, pace and immediacy. The paint is flicked and stroked across the surface of the canvas in a welter of gestural brush marks that pick out and delineate the facial features of the subject. Letters and phrases are scattered across the picture plane, emphasising the graphic nature of the image and providing an ambiguous commentary to accompany their icon-like faces. These pictures are not psychologically penetrative; the subjects are mostly unknowable and remote. They explore a pictorial iconography of mysterious regality, feminine guile and archetype that is common to the popular stories of all these women.