Fearless John

Fearless John – the story behind a watercolour painting.

I was walking through a shopping centre in Ashford one day in the summer between terms at art school when something caught my eye.

There was something strange about the young man working at the mobile phone kiosk – I’d already walked by when my brain finally worked out that it was the handlebar moustache he sported.

Fearless John, watercolour painting by Lee Devonish, 2011 | handlebar moustache painting — Fearless John. Watercolour on paper, 2011.

A handlebar moustache painting was already on my mind…

I’d never seen anyone so young wearing a moustache like that, so carefully curled. It stood out to me because I’d been thinking about male facial hair a lot at the time, as part of a project on gender signifiers. (At the time, I was pretty oblivious to trends. I didn’t have a tv and I had no interest in fashion: both still true. I didn’t realise that soon, handlebar moustaches would be on everyone, even as jewellery and clothing prints on those who couldn’t grow them.)

After I got home, I started to regret not asking the stranger if I could paint his portrait.

It’s more than a bit strange, sure, but I decided to ask the next time I saw him, if there was ever a next time.

Of course, I did see him the very next time I went into town, but this time I was armed with my camera and business card to prove I wasn’t just a nutter. He was actually quite happy to be painted, which was a relief in that situation! I took my picture and scurried away as fast as I could.

Discovering my mystery model’s identity

After the term had started, one of my classmates saw my painting and recognised my subject as one of her friends and told me his name – John. I’d actually aged him up a bit. I now had a name (and a title) for my painting.

Still, he was very pleased with the result when I carried the painting down to the shopping centre to show him. That’s the last I saw of John.

This artwork is available as a postcard here.

Expat Or Immigrant

Expat or immigrant?

Both are the same, of course, and I am both at once… but which word do you choose, and for whom? Your dominant affiliation will answer – how you see yourself and your authority in the world, and the authority of your country of origin vs the country you go to.

However, the history of the words and their applications carries much more than a personal choice.

Racism embedded in language

Many people think, with good reason, that the term “expat” has become synonymous with white migrant workers, whilst “immigrant” has been reserved for people of colour who go overseas to work. There’s more at work than just race. There’s nationalism and wealth to consider when we think of expat or immigrant.

Expat or immigrant - art about migration and how we describe immigrants. Expat 1. Watercolour on paper by Lee Devonish, 2016 — Expat 1. Watercolour on paper, 2016.

Hierarchies of words

The words don’t need to carry these meanings, but they’re reinforced by the way we repeatedly address the hierarchical relationships between rich and poor, coloniser and colonised, expat and immigrant.

What feels even more strange is the way that we migrants – immigrants or emigrants – refer to ourselves. As a Bajan abroad, I’ve always thought of myself as an immigrant. I learned to frame my self in relation to my new country, not my old one, even though I carried my old culture around with me and only ever saw my travels as a temporary measure at the start.

It’s the weight of culture that tells us that we are immigrants when we go to a bigger, richer country. Perhaps it’s time to start defining ourselves as emigrants or expats in our choice of language and letting that seep into our identities.

Expat vs immigrant. A work of art about the difference between words. Expat 2 - watercolour on paper by Lee Devonish, 2016. — Expat 2. Watercolour on paper, 2016.

Using art to talk about the expat vs immigrant relationship

Instead of using words to fight words, I’ve used another language to discuss this hierarchical relationship.

Fitting the medium to the message of immigration

Instead of treating these paintings with reverence, I’ve purposed them to be disseminated widely. They will only be available through print-on-demand platforms, and their imagery will be placed on somewhat incongruous surfaces for mass consumption.

Visit my dissemination experiment here: Expat 1 / Expat 2

Expat vs Immigrant Canvas Art — Canvas print available on Zippi

Concept/Word/Image

Concept/Word/Image:

A few years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “The Thought That Counts”, on hierarchical dualisms within academic and non-academic modes of thought.

In it, I tried to address all manner of subjects including conceptualism, craft, feminism and graphic novels, linking these through similarities within oppositional pairings.

The sprawling project did earn me my Master’s degree but also helped me to address my own practice, in the way in which I became interested in binding thought, language and writing with the image.

Mixing it all together

Personally, I’ve come to re-think my previous work on the gendered gaze, or the male as recipient of the gendered gaze, and try to combine visual and textual elements to be read as equal signifiers… or ignored, at the viewer’s pleasure.

The visual representation of thought is a concrete device of the graphic novel that I want to transport to the realm of the single-frame ‘fine’ art piece.

Sketchbook doodle by Lee Devonish, 2015

Why watercolour?

I’ve chosen watercolour for this kind of work precisely for its unfashionable status and attachment to now-repugnant understandings of art and middle-class respectability. (Think twee cottages and greetings cards.) There’s also the matter of its legibility – it’s familiar and understandable, and downright gorgeous at times.

What’s next?

I don’t know.

As my work continues I hope for it to provoke some internal discussion over the remaining hierarchical structures surrounding concept, word and image – will it actually succeed? .

Need To Earn: A Basic Income Artwork

An unexpected commission…

A colleague of mine gave me a little man and asked me to do something with him… something reflecting my personality.

What?

Well, that automatically threw me into a tailspin – I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do, since I couldn’t even figure out what I was supposed to be “about”!

Need To Earn, 2016. Watercolour and acrylic on wood.

I was pleased that she asked me, but I sat down in a bit of a funk and wondered what I was going to do. I had ideas on the back burner for Foreign Exchange, which I’d been telling my friend about, but with so many ongoing projects in the other pockets of my life, I’d not gotten around to them… and they couldn’t be attached to this anyway. This was supposed to reflect me somehow, and that was the problem. I carried this little guy around in my handbag for months.

Basic Income

Meanwhile, I was reading about money, income and inequality. One day it suddenly occurred to me that I knew what I was thinking about, and that I had to start working on the commission. For some time I’d been reading articles on the idea of basic income, or universal basic income (UBI): the concept that a country’s citizens could be paid a flat rate of income by the government, not linked to work or means testing.

It appealed to me as a tool for feminism because it has the potential to transform the lives of women who perform unpaid and therefore undervalued labour in the home. Breaking the link between income and value would transform the way we think about work and about each other.

Income and value/money and morality

Money and morality have a sticky relationship, thanks in part to lingering Victorian ideology. We can hold two opposing thoughts in our heads:

a. that those who are poorer than us have made themselves that way by being immoral wastrels and vagabonds who would rather buy fags and booze with their benefits than get jobs.

b. that those who are richer than us have made themselves that way by the amoral pursuit of Mammon and would sell their own grandmothers for a profit (or by inheriting their parents’ riches, thus being both undeserving and corrupted).

We’re not comfortable with the very rich or the very poor, but we don’t seem (as a whole) to like the idea of UBI because it means giving money to people who don’t deserve it. Even if we all got the same amount, something about not earning… it feels immoral.

Still, having to rely on a paycheque to prove your worth in the world is cracked, in my view. No human being should have to prove their worth or their right to live based on how much they earn.

What is a mother’s labour worth?

Your mother earned nothing by giving birth to you, but that act could never be remunerated. I still have a lot of reading to do around the subject before I write anything at length, but as a starting point… here I am.

To start with, I’ve found Inventing The Future: Postcapitalism And A World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Any recommendations?

Postparoxysmal 1

As its name suggests, this piece was the product of the aftermath of a fight.

The story

Not long married, my husband and I had – to put it mildly – a bit of an explosive disagreement, which fortunately was resolved before too long. It made a longer lasting mark on his already permanently scowling face, though, and somehow his hair had managed to whip itself up into a whirlwind – it seemed to be the outward expression of what was going on in his head.

It was so ridiculous that it broke the tension and made me laugh.

Of course, that didn’t go down very well, but neither did taking his picture and threatening to paint him. I did it anyway.

I liked the space after the paroxysm – a minute after a storm that makes you think, “what just happened?” and wonder whether it was real, or whether you imagined it… and wonder whether it will happen again.

At the time, I was struggling to find time and space to make any new work, after moving to Lancashire and being newly married, so watercolour seemed to be the medium that worked best for my life at the time. I started to experiment with writing in paint, and this led to my handwriting prints, which led to this painting.

The words

Why the speech bubble? I had to include it. The text element is more of an indication of my interest in graphic novels and the crossover between drawing and writing than an actual quotation, although the words were chosen carefully to reflect his character.

The words act as his portrait as much as the image does.

Click on the picture to read the story behind Postparoxysmal 1 - watercolour on paper painting by Lee Devonish, 2014

It’s a part of our family now, so although it has been exhibited, I’ll never sell it. I’ve made this piece available as a postcard print on Zazzle.