60 x 60 cm | 23 x 23 in
Subject: Abstract
Tags:
Bedroom
Original painting in oil and acrylic on linen canvas.
"A study of the dress in an elegant 17th Century portrait of a lady. Here the lady is almost absent: the painting was never about her, it was about her status, her clothes. The hand is limp and ineffectual, just as it was carefully painted to be."
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.