In recalling stories of our past, the visual arts allows us to look back and see how our civilisation has evolved over the centuries. In exploring art history in my paintings I recall stories of the past and reimagine genre paintings combining history and fantasy. I am interested in the European visual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries where the upper classes are portrayed in bucolic landscapes. Having disturbed the veneers of beauty and gentility by transforming fashionably dressed elite women into hybrid characters I fuse reality with illusion. Questioning the classical canons of beauty and identity and the way women have been portrayed across centuries I reimagine the female form into renewed chimerical landscapes. They have been displaced from their place of origin. Using my imagination I travel through time which is fluid, transient, unpredictable, ephemeral, historical and non-linear. I have re-imagined the historical genre paintings and rethreaded the past within a contemporary framework inviting the viewer to participate in remembering and reinventing new fictions and to tell new tales.
Tanya Chaitow
