The Detritus of Childhood: Paintings by Sarah Raphael at Marlborough Graphics

Sarah Raphael shows works spanning a period from 1997 through to 2001 and the tragic interruption of her death. The final canvas is left hanging half completed as if she would return to it the next day.

These paintings span an enormous range also of experience. They start with a series of works done in Australia on a trip made possible by her winning the Jerwood prize in 1993. They then move into what I take to be various phases of her response to the experience of bringing up children.

The Australian paintings are ineffable, romantic and curiously old fashioned. Sort of Samuel Palmer meeting Dubuffet. They speak a language of a romantic, and one imagines a woman travelling alone exploring her own persona. What is old fashioned about them is their particular romantic naturalism, very different for instance from Therese Oulton who makes superficially similar oceanic type works.

The next phase opens something entirely different. Perhaps rather fancifully I would identify it as a growing epistemology of childhood reflecting her experience of the growth of her children’s minds.

The first of these paintings are called the strip paintings. They seem to be at the beginning of a catalogue of the detritus of childhood, stray lego bricks dropped, pasta shells, bits of pencil, cartoon like figures, and a visual language that seems influenced by comic strips, with the inclusion of speech bubbles and thought bubbles and sequences of picture frames, in a cartoon strip. These objects are set out in a two dimensional space and named, a bit like a picture book: the equivalent of a picture vocabulary test and the echo of countless nights spent entertaining the child before sleep. But this is a lot more than just a long list of cataloguing a la pop, always in these paintings there is a sense of a thrust towards a meaning beyond the obvious, a kind of incipient transcendence. The nearest thing might be the work of Lisa Milroy. Nevertheless this is a kind of naming and pointing thinking, which reminds me of the stage of naming vocabulary in childhood where the child will point to an object and give it a single labelled name.

In the next phase (end of tape)