60 x 40 cm | 23 x 15 in
Subject: People
Tags:
Playful,
Children,
Pale,
Pink,
Innocent,
Neutral Palette,
Childhood
Original painting in oil on canvas.
Latham imbues her paintings with emotion through the careful use of colour and form. Art, as Latham shows, has a peculiar power to provoke emotion and it is what critic Clive Bell, in 1914, explained is the “aesthetic emotion”, the essential difference between art and all other objects. In Latham’s imagery, colour is used to affect an emotional response, and spatial devices are used to evoke a sense of belonging or alienation in the image’s narrative. In turn, each painting conjures memory to invoke empathy and contemplation of the self in direct relation to the other.
"A depiction of the kind of infancy nobody ever had: sugar sweet and squeaky clean."
It’s the double lens of Helen Latham’s work that makes it extraordinary.
She’s not just painting children or painting as a child might. She’s doing something far more rare: she’s inhabiting the inner world of childhood from within, and then rendering it with the full consciousness, technique, and sophistication of an adult artist.
The paintings don’t just show a child’s world - they are a child’s world, felt from the inside. Embodied, luminous, tactile, real.
They don’t illustrate - they remember. But not as an adult recalling the past. As if the past itself is still living, breathing, and available through the skin.
Helen has just joined the Masters section. That feels exactly right.