Portsmouth artist explores Dreams, Memes and Manifestations in new exhibition

There you will find an exhibition featuring the works of Portsmouth artist Ella Kilgour (who is based at the Art Space in Southsea) who professes herself to have been under Reynolds’ powerful and formal spell and influence.

Seemingly straight copies of Georgian beauties, androgynous youths with wavy locks, and children with cherubic faces impress mightily by their sensitive execution and fidelity to their great originals.

But tarry a little longer before the portraits and the scenes on show and you’ll quickly discern an impish and mischievous element at play in many of Kilgour’s works.

One beauty has a cat’s ears and whiskers daubed onto her face; an adorable little girl has a childish crown balanced in outline on her head and LITTLE KWEEN scored under her chin. Two horses, based on those by the celebrated painter George Stubbs, have unicorns’ horns added to their muzzles.

As Dreams, Memes and Manifestations – the title of Kilgour’s charming exhibition – suggests, there’s all manner of stimulating surrealism and even subversion afoot.

Addressing the works of Reynolds, she declares in her exhibition manifesto: ‘Despite their obvious formality, the portraits are strangely ethereal. I have spent many hours looking at them, trying to absorb and understand their magic. The female figures in Reynolds’ paintings are often nestled in darkness, seemingly lit from within. They appear like floating clouds in their diaphanous, luminous dresses – and it is this tender, dream-like quality which I wanted to explore.’

Kilgour’s ‘Paranormal Madonna’, referencing Reynolds’ ‘Portrait of Mrs Richard Hoare’, exemplifies this exploration. Seeming to float in the darkness, an eighteenth-century Madonna draped in lilac holds her chubby-faced infant over her knees. The image evokes both the Pietà and Our Lady Queen of Heaven.

The portrait of the Beckford sisters by Reynolds’ contemporary George Romney has inspired ‘Sunset Levitation’. In the original, the older girl stands over her younger sister who sits beside her on the ground in a clear codification of sibling power. In Kilgour’s painting, the senior sibling is alone and stares out boldly as she ascends heavenward. (A stubborn material fact: the immense Beckford fortune was built on slave-plantations in Jamaica.)

The great seventeenth-century master Velazquez depicted the Infanta Margarita decorously holding her skirts like a great bell. Kilgour’s response in ‘Float up Margarita!’ is to have the princess lit up by a splendid chandelier; she has billowed up to the ceiling.

Another seventeenth-century subject, rather less exalted, is ‘A Maid Milking’, by the Dutch artist Gerard ter Borch. Re-titled ‘A Questionable Act’, the cow moons out at the viewer with questioning and effronted eyes, a question mark hovering in a cloud over its head.

We are now in the territory of the one-take meme. Captioned, jokey and satirical, high art is here juxtaposed with the ‘low brow’. Kilgour says, ‘The internet also feeds my visual diet. The meme crystallises the moments of humanity, which are both funny and touching, and it is this kind of observation (of sweetness or absurdity) which I am often drawn to paint.’

A cat stares at itself in the mirror and the picture bears the self-help legend: ‘You’re good enough; you’re smart enough; people like you.’ A trio of ‘Sea Dog’ paintings pun literally on the hardened mariner title to show three canines breasting the waves, dwarfed by the mighty sea and cosmos. They are droll and hauntingly majestic at the same time.

Kilgour is an instinctive, experimental painter. It is only latterly that she discerns thematic method in the creative madness. She confesses: ‘Several of the paintings in this exhibition began as “master copies” but derailed along the way into more off-beat interpretations, as I began to play with their composition and introduce layers of neon and opalescent colour.’

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Indeed, the profusion of pink in the paintings is as arresting and bracing as Zandra Rhodes’ hair-dye. The portrait of a demure young woman is disturbed by the addition of a pair of titular ‘Pink Wings’ and ‘naïvely’ painted pale breasts – two amusing visual tropes which recur elsewhere. In ‘Donut Hallucination’, a bright, pink-iced donut is borne aloft by a pair of angel’s wings to hover temptingly in front of a small dog.

Wit and whimsy continue in a series of ‘Château’ paintings. ‘Any Day Now’ and ‘Chateau’ [sic] are crudely written in white paint in front of vibrant renderings of two stately piles, while in ‘Chateau Prayers’ an elegant hand dangles not rosary beads but a string of pearls and sports a bling ring with a miniature of the very castle which looms behind. Conspicuous consumption jostles with a desire for security and home.

These subjects introduce us to the third element underpinning the exhibition identified by Kilgour: manifestation. She says: ‘Manifestation is the idea that an individual can bring their material desires or emotional ambitions into being by achieving a clear, internal dialogue with themselves about what it is that they want. It is a topic which enjoys a lot of attention on social media channels, and the language has crept into these paintings. I can’t speak for the efficacy of practising manifestation, but I find the concept irresistibly optimistic.’

Kilgour continues: ‘Painting is an act of manifestation in itself; something spiritual and unreal becomes real. My lifestyle might not afford me a chateau or a chandelier – but I can dream of one and I can paint one. I think that there is something sweet about this. Our dreams tell us something important about ourselves and what we value, whether or not they become true.’

She adds: ‘Manifestation also refers to the psyche and forms taken by the subconscious mind. Ghosts and paranormal visitations, both human and animal, weave themselves in and out of the paintings.’

A couple of these visitations are decidedly racy. In ‘Witch’s Revenge’ (based on Albert Joseph Penot’s ‘Departure for the Witches’ Sabbath’), a nude and curvaceous witch looks out at the viewer as she rides a phallic broomstick, her abundant pink head of hair seeming to combust as it flares heavenward. ‘Paranormal Romance’ includes two naked and alluring fairies tripping the light fantastic of a chandelier.

Death’s heads feature in ‘Little Moth’ and ‘Outback Communion’ with a Hamlet-like figure brandishing a skull in the latter as two phantom kangaroos loom in the night sky – funny ha-ha undercutting funny peculiar. There are several other animal hauntings and levitations while boldly executed landscapes and seascapes evoke the Romantic sublime.

Kilgour summarises the exhibition: ‘From the meeting of these disparate elements [Dreams, Memes and Manifestations] a kind of eighteenth-century style surrealism emerges. Old worlds clash with new. Moments of classicism collide with moments of childishness.’

A tension is created between the Romantic and the pedestrian, she claims, before adding: ‘There is a tension too, which is at the core of my painting – the push and pull between the discipline of accuracy and representation, and the looseness of energy and feeling. At times the works push into the dreamy world of soft loose marks and vivid colour, only to pull back in other moments into a structured figurative observation. For me, it is in the space between the two that something truthful is reached.’

Kilgour is a very talented portrait painter as certain subjects taken from the life attest. At the same time, the softness and the dark empty spaces on many of the canvases leave capacious room for each spectator’s imagination. There is a postmodern breadth of reference and spirit of playfulness with none of the familiar sense of postmodern cynicism and disenchantment. I was enlivened and enchanted by this talented painter’s creations and look forward to her ongoing development with keen anticipation.

Hers has been a rapid rise. Kilgour trained in Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art. After working in graphic design for several years and moving to Australia, she threw over the tyranny of the computer and became a picture framer which introduced her to the world of painting. Kilgour has only been painting since 2016 and hails the mentorship of a ‘beautiful friend’. Her clear passion and enthusiasm for her artistic vocation have already garnered impressive professional recognition. She was a finalist in the Australian Lethbridge Art Prize, and this year was shortlisted for the Hollybush Emerging Woman Painter Prize.

Dreams, Memes and Manifestations continues at the Yellow Edge Gallery, 107 Stoke Road, Gosport, PO12 1LR, until July 31, 11am – 3pm, weekdays, 12am – 5pm weekends. The artist will be painting in residence at the gallery until this coming Friday.