THE TIMES ART CAPSULE

The Times Art Capsule or The Time's Art Capsule

This is an installation with two canvases, #2x90cm, painted in acrylic. The one on the left opens from left to right. Behind this opening canvas is a set of memories: The Times newspaper, I highlight the word 'paper', published on 20-10-2005, all the worn brushes I used to make this work that took me five months, and a tooth, part of the pain I went through with it while making this work.

Newspapers like The Times (London, UK) are for reading. The images that accompany them are a complement.

In this case, I created my own news (the installation), which has more than 240 faces that I could see in that newspaper and its supplements (it was Thursday).

The real news is written on the canvas on the left with the titles "My news" and "My personal news". On the right canvas it is written that... On 20-10-2005 I read The Times... in my own way.

The portraits of people on the right-hand canvas and on these pages are of two types, those of the news or advertising and those of the people who wrote them. The images of the news and ads come in many colours, while those of the people who wrote the news, columns, articles, opinions, etc. have portraits painted in "classic" skin or alike colours, are clustered in three groups and each one is larger than the majority of the other portraits.

The first image I did, top left, started to be a classic paint, all changed after. Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson have portraits close to the newspaper images.

The first image I did made me think of the whole work (explained in The Amateur 2nd edition), while the images of the couple were already portraits. Note that Lady Hamilton looks at Lord Hamilton with admiration and love, a detail that does not appear in her original portraits.

The quality of the images varies. On canvas, most of the images are only one inch, at most two inches (5 cm) and their print quality also varies.

I'm sure you can identify many sportsmen and women from the UK or who were in the UK at the time (sports), and many other people, from politics, war, culture, the arts, theatre, celebrities, musical performers and national or international film and theatre stars, and so on.

There is a page with two images each one with many blurred faces. It was about a baseball team. I think it was in the news because of corruption in sports in the US, although the case related with that team was old.

I wanted to individualise each person in small framed portraits, which is difficult when they are all together and superimposed on the canvas.



Phillip Reese