Doomed to failure
Over the next fifteen months I shall be working on an extensive series of paintings and prints which take Shakespeare’s plays as their source. King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and MSND are my initial starting points. I have consciously taken four of his most iconic and celebrated plays and will be giving extensive attention to his two most acclaimed tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear.
This body of work has been commissioned by the British Shakespeare Association, to be exhibited at their fifth major conference, which shall be held at Homerton College and the Faculty of Education, Cambridge University in September 2011. Alongside the paintings will be a body of poems by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
I am particularly interested in getting to the core of Shakespearian tragedy and exploring the difference between tragedy in painting and literature. I am also keen to explore the difference between how the idea of tragedy manifests itself then and now.
One aspect of tragedy in Shakespeare is the idea of inevitability. When Lead first divides his kingdom there is a sense that it will be the cause of disastrous effects. Taking the greatest play by the greatest playwright (by critical and popular opinion) as a source for paintings is potentially hazardous. It is similar to the idea of Icarus’ flight to the sun. But the realist in me says (aware that an analogy is being stretched) that perhaps reaching the sun, wings burnt and plummeting into the sea might even be an achievement beyond the reach of this painter and this project. A more realistic conclusion might be me squirming about on the floor in a desperate attempt to find flight, ending in a fall more like the blind Gloucester’s in Lear. It is almost certain that the aspirations of the project are far more grandiose than the results. It is doomed to failure. There seems to be something tragically inevitable about this failure that might just be, ironically, the closest I get to Shakespearian tragedy.