Acts of Love

There has been abundant coverage on love-related themes in the media this week which has prompted me to put my oar in. There is no doubt that all the artists I represent 'love' the work that they do. Since it is such a difficult way of making a living this is the reason why most of them continue. Each work created could be argued to be an Act of Love. The artist I wanted to highlight in this post, Ellen Bell, has created a series of works over the past year entitled Acts of Love. Templates of famous paintings were the starting point for this series of work juxtaposed with an imagined narrative incorporating words and sentences from contemporary works of fiction. 

One example, Acts of Love (7), the template taken from Thomas Gainsborough's, Mr & Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk),1785 and currently hanging in The National Portrait Gallery. Painted at a time when women's only hope of recognition was through the status of marriage. Ellen cleverly gives the characters a new life by inserting text from Samuel Beckett's 'Play'. Published in 1962 at the rise of the women's liberation movement, she invites questions about intimacy and relationship within marriage. Similarly, Acts of Love (8), inspired by R. Singer Sargent's, Mr & Mrs I.N Phelps Stokes,1987 incorporates text from Willy Russell's Shirley Valentine published in 1986. Taking the form of a monologue the play focuses on a middle-aged housewife and her transforming experiences when she takes life into her own hands. Echoing the position of the couple in the original painting the text fills the female image whilst the male has no dialogue at all. Much of the power of Ellen Bell's work is in the mastery she has over the choice of words, the delicacy with which individual words are placed, the visual associations we have with the original work and her immense love and knowledge of literature.

Sebastian Faulk's series, Faulks on Fiction, currently running on the BBC and available on BBC Iplayer looked at the subject of 'Love' on February 12th with a premise that much of our interpretation of what love means comes from our understanding of fiction. Citing Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice as his first reference and following on through with other novels in twentieth century English literature. Whether one agrees with him or not, in my experience words can be understood very differently depending on whether they are read or spoken and depending on our relationship or perception of the person, and what our state of mind and feeling is at the time. Creating an alternative framework in which text can appear as in Ellen Bell's work can allow us to engage with questions about themes in our life, like love, in a new way. Surely that is what art is meant to do.