Eleanor, Mt Amos

Another painting in the ‘family’ series. My daughter Eleanor, her cousin, Aunty Anitia and my husband (still feels unfamiliar to refer to Kim this way) hiked up Mt Amos, Freycinet, on the weekend before Christmas. It proved to be a bit of a hard climb, quite technical and at times, slightly scary. At the top, they took a classic holiday type of snapshot to celebrate their climb.

A snapshot like this is not often first-choice reference material for a portrait. My daughter is very photogenic and, like most young people, highly aware of how she wants to look in a photo. She didn’t like this photo much. She knows what picture that she wants to present to the world. Fair enough. She knows how to use her assets and therefore in most photos she looks perfect, poised & posed.

This photo is quite candid in that something about the photo radiates (to me) many of the things I love about her: her openness, willingness to undertake a challenge, sense of fun, engagement with the world and people around her. She looks to me like the delightful person that she is: free of any artifice and on the cusp of starting something new….

There’s something else in this choice of photo lurking below the surface. It’s probably the mother thing again: I probably want to capture the sense of the child that I bore and love (and not let go of her into adulthood, even though I know I must).

Because the photo was taken by Kim, his perspective of her is also embedded in this viewpoint. He’s looking down at her from his lofty height, whereas if I had taken this photo, I would be looking up at her. And that would make the composition less successful. Of course, the view behind her also makes a good backdrop and I like to reflect a sense of place in a painting.

Clearly, there’s a lot that draws me to do a painting from a particular photo and a lot of things to tease out. And the spotted shirt. I wanted to paint that spotted shirt.