PARIS SPLIT SHOW / MLADEN

Having been commissioned to do this show by the French cultural Alliance, I thought about my relationship with France and its culture and came to realise it is Paris specifically which I am most connected to and Paris to me where the people who made Paris what it was.

The show however is in the institution in Split, where also I live and am painting the show physically, so I wanted to , also present this city in the show, which is why it has both the city names in the title.

To present Split I am also painting a number of portraits, but as this is the more physical, and present of the two cities in my actual life , my relation to it is physical, the portraits for this part of the concept are larger , more material, more tactile and opaque, the have a scent of paint which is stronger, they are the more monumental. These portraits as opposed trough skype -the way I painted the Paris part of the show, are painted in real life, with the muse in my studio, drinking, and listening to music, conversing and in my case dancing.

It has been a very long time since I painted a portrait of Mladen. We had just started dating and I invented a show in Split, to keep me here, to have something to do here, another purpose,  because I was not returning to London - because of Mladen. I was painting him in that phase, when the painting is part of my seductive dance. Well it worked and here I am many years later, in Split, where I stayed because of him, and where we where married and built our home. So I paint him as my Split, for he is probably the main character in my story of this city.

It was strange though . I gave him a time and date a while ago to prepare for this mentaly,  as I do to all my muses, to take it seriously, and we painted in the studio, with music on, drinks, son refusing to sleep and looking for attention in parts, but I found it unusual how different he was whilst I was painting him. The personality that reigns in the home , at work, with friends, no none of those where present. I was let into something new which I don't even know how to interpret. It was nice. It was nice to share with him the act of the painting, my thing, not just the personality I become when running the home, and  the him becoming the muse. Actually sailor man is  good looking, I was re discovering as I painted the familiar.