Vanitas 1 Our Generation

Becky comes from an artistic and literary background based in Brixham Devon. She studied art in the early seventies but got diverted by literature and, latterly, the social development of adolescents. The research undertaken as part of her MA reconnected her to her own adolescence and its influences.

 

Coming from a creative family Becky was always drawn to imagery and how artists interpreted the known and unknown, the sacred and profane, the human, the humane and the inhumane. The convent she attended as a child and teenager was dominated by religious imagery, the secular world mostly ignored unless it mirrored conformity and patriarchy. These challenged her liberal upbringing. During her 1970s art school education her influences became rock music, fashion, feminism, popular culture, Dada, modernism and the places and objects her family loved, becoming symbols of love, conflict and loss. Becky creates the works to acknowledge these and the impact religious violence, guilt, piety, sainthood, patriarchal art history and conformity had on a young girl – considering how she challenged and interpreted these in her adolescence. Becky creates intertextual works in adulthood as she deconstructs and reconstruct the relationship between her education, Catholicism, her adolescence, her identity and her family’s creativity to create a new context in her own art. Becky is not a Catholic and although challenging, this has become an interesting collaboration.

 

Becky is a UNESCO English Riviera Ambassador Artist. Becky’s work has developed into distinct themes:

· Influence of religious dogma on childhood, adolescence and feminism and an emerging female artist in the Seventies.

 

· Referencing the objects, places and influences in her past including rock music and popular culture.

 

· Rituals, past and present, that influence the future. These include how patriarchal and hierarchal orders have been subverted by feminine strength.

 

Becky’s works are paintings, mixed media and collage. She paints mainly in acrylic and ink block but she also uses mixed media often including parts of her original childhood and art student works which are collaged into paintings. Works are on wood, canvas or canvas board. Works with a reference to religious iconography re – imagine the paintings in convent schools. Becky sometimes collages copies of works by her father and children into her work to show the artistic tradition that runs through her family.

 

Collages are works influenced by mythic, ancient, religious, and antiquarian images. These are merged into a contemporary narrative, resolved by the viewers own interpretation Becky’s works are figurative, narrative subjects. Researching family photos, traditional religious iconography, the representation of women in popular culture and the creativity of feminist women artists, her works flip the male gaze and the submissive roles of her generation of women. She invents narratives with characters from her imagination. Paintings start with a portrait but end as a stranger. These strangers gaze at you or past you but occupy the same space.

 

Becky is influenced by the Dada women artists, Modernist literature, Mina Loy, Barbara Hulanicki, Biba makeup, mid-century ceramics, Vivienne Westwood, David Bowie, David Hockney, Ossie Clarke, Celia Birtwell, Joseph Cornell, Lucien Freud, Botticelli, Paul Gauguin, Pre Raphaelites, children’s literature, rock music, drum solos and guitar riffs

 

Ink Block on Canvas Board

34x64cm 

 

Framed