Oh baby …
This little 2008 painting by the British painter Chantal Joffe finds the strange and enigmatic in the most familiar garden summer scene. Toddlers in a plastic turtle paddling pool become the babes in the woods.
Keeping mum …
The bottle green of murky ponds and fir trees dominates. The forest they are lost in, though, is the unknowable world of childhood experience: the mysterious way kids connect with other kids. Locked in their own private game, the painter’s daughter shuts her eyes as her red-haired playmate’s face turns away.
New shoots …
Joffe’s paintings of mothers and children have chronicled how bodies and emotions change across the years. Here, her daughter cooling off with her cousin becomes a step in the road of a child’s detachment from a mother. The painter watches, protectively, at a distance.
Family values …
It’s a remarkably rich, stealthily low-key example of what Joffe has dubbed her “distillation of the everyday”, transforming the stuff of family snaps into telling scenes, sharp with feeling.
Chantal Joffe: Personal Feeling Is the Main Thing, The Lowry, Salford, to 2 September
