Venetia Cuninghame Left (After John D Green)

Towering above the viewer, Richard Phillips’ Venetia Cuninghame (left) (After John d Green) is a monumental photo-realist painting from his celebrated series Birds of Britain. This iconic group of portraits was based on photographs that first appeared in John d Green’s 1967 book of the same title: a witty compendium featuring 58 girls who defined the ‘swinging Sixties’. Executed in 2002, the present work belongs to a diptych based on Green’s 1966 photograph of the actress Venetia Cuninghame, who was twenty years old at the time and had just starred in the 1965 short film A Penny For Your Thoughts or ‘Birds, Dolls & Scratch’ English Style. Green’s original intention had been to photograph Cuninghame at Highgate Cemetery wearing heavy white make-up with a tarantula on her cheek. As it began to rain they returned to his Kensington studio, only to discover that the spider had perished. Instead, Green photographed Cuninghame alone, her hair still drenched from the downpour. Decades later, misled by the book’s title, Phillips chanced upon Birds of Britain whilst searching for a picture of a great horned owl. The present image caught his attention, along with pictures of several other women including Suzanna Leigh, Rory Davis and Ingrid Boulting. Enlarging the original photographs to dramatic proportions in glossy grey-scale paint, and picking out eyes and teeth details in shimmering aluminium leaf, Phillips recasts his subjects as lost cultural icons – distant, illusive and unattainable. ‘The reflective aluminium leafing … was intended to exploit the limitless, spatial light-effect and literally encourage the eye to pass in and through the portraits’, he explains. ‘The grisaille flesh is set up as a hollow mask further stripping the subjects of their physical and psychological identity, and leaving the portraits with a sense of disorientation and horror’ (R. Phillips, quoted in interview with Y. Dziewior in Richard Phillips, exh. cat., Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, 2002, p. 98). Phillips’ treatment of the image evokes a plethora of art-historical traditions: from gilded Medieval devotional tableaux and Renaissance diptychs to Pop portraiture and Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings. The work was shown in the year of its creation in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, and was illustrated on the front cover of the catalogue.