'Way Down South Where I was Born in’ Paintings by Deborah Glass (8th Feb 1939 – 25th April 2011) I first came across these paintings by Deborah Glass when her daughter Emily, a colleague at the school, absent-mindedly mentioned that her mum was a painter…these days the internet makes it easy to check out an artist’s work and within seconds I was looking through the eyes of this extraordinary painter at a world that was in some ways evocatively recognisable and yet in many ways deeply and intriguingly personal and unique. “These paintings were inspired by almost 500 family photographs taken by my American grandfather from 1915 – 1945. He, his wife, and his seven children lived in a very small town on the borders of North and South Carolina. I have been asked why I chose these particular photographs to reinterpret in oils. It was nothing to do with my relationship to the people, nor was it for sentimental reasons. It was to do with the way my grandfather posed them through his camera’s lens. There were no candid or action shots nor did anyone exhibit much emotion. In retrospect I think I reacted to this by making their features indistinct.” Most families have an ‘archive’ of old photographs taken over the years, and as the medium of photography has changed over the years so the photographs we look at can be placed and dated by their physical attributes. The hues and colours created by the chemicals used to make the photos can place the images within a particular era, just as the clothes and scenes depicted serve to further create that distance between us and them. When I was a child and certainly for generations beforehand we would all line up for our photographs to be taken, face-on to the camera, singly, or often in family groups…dressed up in our best, hats on before a wedding perhaps, occasions marked on film. As such the shapes and formats reflected in these paintings are universally recognisable. This universality is enhanced within the work by the fact that identifying features are bleached from the faces and colours are combined, reinvented and enhanced to create an almost visceral response in the viewer… as such we can’t not respond on an emotional level. People who once were but aren’t any more peer at us through these colourful veils as we peer back at them. They are almost appealing to us to be there with them. However for all their indistinct features these characters really inhabit the space, the names and occasions suggested in the titles lending just enough of a hint of the specific to create that historical frisson. “As I sit in my living room looking at these paintings I realize that these people and the lives they led are like dreams. None of it exists anymore. Tobacco is no longer king – the hats, white gloves and dressing up for Easter are gone. This was a small pocket of the Old South which has vanished.” … …but not entirely. Through these paintings Deborah has succeeded in re-animating these people and the scenes in which they exist, and as such this is a small pocket of the past that lives again. Charlotte Chisholm