Cherry Hood’s artistic practice has centred around the portrait, a genre which has a long and perpetual history crossing cultures, time and space. While most artists explore portraiture at some point in their careers, whether portraits of sitters or the introspection of the self-portrait, Hood is a painter of children and adolescents, not quite portraits, but neither imaginary figures or faces. Her large-scale youths are composites, drawn from a range of sources, from individual sitters (other artists and their children, Hood’s own sons) to images of young men and girls borrowed from fashion magazines. Using the unique method of pouring liquid (predominantly watercolour) onto sheets of heavy paper where it is left overnight to pool, stain and settle, Hood uses the expressionistic, accidental technique as a blurry, inky background to her intricate, very meticulous lines making up mouths, noses and penetrating eyes.
Read MoreHood primarily focuses on human subjects, mostly young and male, though there have been female studies, and animals. A solo exhibition which travelled to Zürich and Toronto during 2002, entitled Brüder, featured eighteen portraits of adolescent boys in watery flesh pink, cream and beige hues on a white background. All collectively named Brüder (1-18) or ‘brother’, they at first seem to depict the same model, but on closer inspection there are notable distinctions between physical features and expression. Concentrating predominantly on masculine subjects to escape the historically loaded representation of females, with their tendency to evoke sexualised readings, Hood can use male youths without the overwhelming context of the past to forge new, important questions by ‘gently reversing and ironically commenting on issues of gender and identity’. Having travelled to the Mediterranean multiple times throughout her career, it is apparent that the sculptural representation of classical male figures in the transition between childhood and adulthood, innocence and sexuality, have been an influence here. Hood, however, in her photographic style, creates boys that are infinitely more ‘real’ and consequently, a more voyeuristic experience for viewer and artist alike.
Hood’s most recent works, moving away from the bust, place her children into landscape or dark, dangerous backdrops. Lost to the Land (16 May – 10 June 2006) was the manifestation of the artist’s tree-change, having moved from Sydney to a new home in the country. Inspired by the relics and fragments of the children who lived there before her, Hood was amazed by how far they had roamed and begun to consider, inadvertently, the history and stories of lost children in the Australian bush. A place of imagination but simultaneously danger, Hood explores the isolation of the lost child in the Australian bush and the misplay of children in their search of self. Aware of the lost child in true stories and art, such as the narrative paintings of Frederick McCubbin and the poems of Henry Lawson, Hood places her children in familiar but foreboding terrain; wallabies, joeys and horses once their playmates, now unhelpful onlookers.
1. Rachel Kent, The Many Faces of Cherry Hood, Art & Australia, Vol. 41 no. 3, 2004, p. 402.
