Dialogic Portrait: Althea Greenan (no. 8)
Artist statement:
From 2009 I started making series of Dialogic Portraits, producing watercolour portraits and recorded discussions with sitters, and books or films drawing on both images and discussions. For the first series I invited people to sit who I'd worked with during the decade of not painting (1999-2009) when, after 25 years as an artist, I'd relinquished my studio for full-time employment at the Hayward and Tate Britain. I produced a book in two volumes, Begin Again n.o 1–21, held by Tate and the Getty (where I'd been a guest scholar in 2012/13).
Dialogic Portraits are usually thematic (e.g 2015, a commission from Turner Contemporary, Margate, producing portraits of older women, artist Rose Wylie, art historians Griselda Pollock, Gill Perry, Anne Wagner, poet/philosopher Denise Riley, curators Lynda Morris, Jenni Lomax, Sandra Drew and the film As If They Existed); or time-based (14 portraits over two years of poet Simon Smith, with a poem by him written from each sitting, handwritten by me at the base of each portrait).
Althea Greenan has been a long-standing librarian and curator with the Women's Art Library which is currently archived at Goldsmiths. I co-founded it as the Women Artists Slide Library (1978-83). Althea Greenan and Simon Smith have sat for me more consistently than anyone else & this consistency produces the best results - greater familiarity, freedom and confidence for both sitter and artist.
This portrait is in a series that I made as artist in residence with the academic research project, People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation (principal investigators Sophie Day, Goldsmiths, Helen Ward, Imperial, Celia Lury, Warwick University); using traditional portrait painting (and watercolour's associations with C19 amateur women artists) to consider with sitters how digital data and photography's ubiquity were changing a sense of selfhood. Ultimately I made a film, Figure to Ground: a Site Losing its System (2021) from the portraits and discussions, which includes Dialogic Portrait: Althea Greenan (no. 8). The film, recordings, texts and images are currently available (2024) at https://peoplelikeyou.ac.uk/portrait/
Because the Covid pandemic had prevented organising an exhibition, in 2021-22 I developed the first of a series of Disoeuvre Household exhibitions in my Ramsgate house. The aim is to explore the concept of the disoeuvre in the context of a domestic house maintaining everyday life. The catalogue, The Disoeuvre: Household Solo – Felicity Allen (Roseville, 2022, ISBN 978-1-7396039-0-8) includes essays by Celia Lury, Althea Greenan and Rachel Warriner, as well as reproducing in situ portraits including Althea's.
The portrait was also shown at an event organised for the research project, and reproduced as part of an online exhibition and, as a detail, in an interview with me in the book Lury, Viney, Wark (eds.), Figure: Concept and Method (Palgrave open access, 2021).