I didn’t imagine it. When I was very young the summer holidays in Belfast really did go on for ever (almost nine weeks certainly felt like forever). And the strangest thing was the kids TV; or really the absence of it. Every year the BBC filled our empty weekday mornings with dubbed (De Lane Lea - thanks Stuart Maconie) French, German or exotic international co-productions (basically involving Yugoslavia) which, like a butterfly, would flutter brightly before disappearing until the same time next year. There was a wistful Robinson Crusoe, some confusing White Horses, and a galloping Flashing Blade. But why start so late into the holiday that they rarely got past the caterpillar stage before I was back kicking a football round my sloping playground? By the time I found out I was at Secondary school and too old to care. The BBC believed only English school children needed their summer mornings filled, some three weeks after their Irish and Scottish peers had started to make their parents long for the return to the school routine. Anyway in amongst these distant curios was a zippy animation, Herge’s Adventures of Tintin. Bursting with imperialist bluster there was no room for a bewildered young Belfast viewer to enter, let alone engage with, whatever was going on. Despite the young shark-fin headed journalist’s extensive travels there was little for us to discover. So it’s strange then that years later my house is full of beautifully realised cast models and hand painted pewter figures, lifted from those tedious stories. But it’s not Tintin I like, or a link to my childhood summers. Instead it’s the objects themselves.
When I see a Celtic top being worn - which is quite often - I know it’s being worn as a sign of support for Celtic and not some aesthete showing their appreciation of the shirt itself, great as it is.
So this last week I’ve spent a lot of time on an image-based painting (there’s a particular kind of satisfying engagement in making and looking at representational subject matter). It turns out it’s an image of me. Though it’s not a self portrait - it was just a poor printout I rediscovered when I was tidying up, and I liked its rough photocopy quality. The subject really then is the degraded visual aesthetic and the process of stencilled marks thar follow in the painting. Really it’s not what the original image depicted, it’s how that image was depicted. But I know no one else will see that. They’ll see a face, mine. And I also know, like the never-ending school holidays, that when we go looking for meaning often all we will find in its place is the mundane.