Page 14 - Art First: Kate McCrickard: New Romantics

Linked to this painting is a set of six exquisite drypoints (pages 34–39). Of the four,
Ghosted I, has entered the collection of the British Museum, where the caption
tells us that despite the historical influences, McCrickard’s title references a modern
dating term for a potential partner silently and unexpectedly ceasing contact.
In McCrickard’s words:
‘Ghosts and phantoms have crept into my work to replace or surround
observed figures taken from life as my imagination finally gets to work
taking the real into the imaginary. Quite unintentionally, depicting a skeleton
or a skull looks to the memento mori theme–fitting to our times, or all times–
and observed with the same black sense of humour so rampant in the medi -
eval Danse Macabre, an artistic motif popular in times of plague and pandemic.
‘The Ghosted drypoints, perhaps oddly, came after the drawings and paint -
ings, considering that the initial springboard was Edvard Munch’s drypoint.
The second print in the suite, Vampires, continues (at least in my mind) the
Bibli cal subject favoured by Renaissance artists–that of Susannah and the
Elders. Here, the young naked woman is replaced by a grappling couple and
the old voyeurs looking on are again ghosted into skeletons. Pushing a motif
through different mediums inevi tably throws up differences: oil painting lends
itself to flesh; the hard black line of drypoint on copper, is bone.’

In other paintings the focus is on edgy relationships where passionate young
adults with fabulously coloured hair, extreme make-up, fashionable tatoos and
body piercings, often only partly dressed, embrace one another with tender
abandon. (Dragueurs; Punks with a Witch; and Goths (pages 24, 25, and 26).
At times a third presence is just visible through an extra arm or in the surprising
form of a skeleton inserting itself like a memory. So-called witches appear in the
form of funky contemporary figures, accompanied by monkeys or taking their
place nonchalantly in cafés. What is fascinating is how convincing the imaginary
figures are, blending easily with the ‘real’, and they are always as beautifully
observed, even when in the mind’s eye.
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