gillistewart@gmail.com
Instagram: @gillistewart
I love painting people. I love to try and capture not just the image of a person, but their personality and their character. I am not so interested in traditional portraiture, but rather portraying people in their everyday lives, to cause us to reflect on some of the ways in which we live.
For example, my handbag project paired paintings of seven individual women with a list of their handbag contents – the list reflecting the personalities of each.
When my children were teenagers, I began selecting and painting social media images. I was fascinated by the then new world of the selfie, a world that teenagers seemed to consider private, in which they pouted, puckered and performed for each other. Usually with head bent low, lips pursed, looking out from under their eyelashes. Or staring provocatively into their own camera lens. Groups of girls would kiss each other, lock arms, cluster together, as if they were one single creature. Spontaneous and posed at the same time. And not in the least private.
In 2014, I found a new interest in painting smaller portraits – the playing card series. This was inspired by how we treat celebrities as if they were Kings and Queens, particularly famous couples. But a playing card is just a thing made of paper, a plaything, not a serious part of life.
During this time, I relocated to New York City and a new world – Battery Park City. I was struck, when I moved here, by how many very young children there are in this area. I was also amazed to see that so many of them, mostly white, were being looked after by African American nannies. This may be normal in NYC, but it is not common in London, where I brought up my own children, or noticeably so anywhere else that I have travelled. I decided that this was something that I was interested in portraying. I wanted to use spontaneous images in my paintings, to capture the feeling of walking around Battery Park City, rather than trying to delve into the societal or economic reasons as to why this might be the case.
I also became fixated on how everyone lives in a bubble, always on their phones, always isolated from the world around them….even when the world around them is rather beautiful and exciting. I started adding fantastical elements in the backgrounds to emphasize this..the world could completely change, a singularity could occur, and almost no-one would notice.
And, then, of course the world changed again, because of Covid. During lockdown, I began working with pastels at home and I learnt how to paint using an iPad. Once I could get back to the studio, I went back to large scale painting, through a series which captures the people who worked throughout lockdown whilst we stayed at home – the dog walkers, the delivery people, the people who collect cans on the streets. And I continue to paint them, because I believe that they deserve our notice, and they are too often invisible to us.