This painting was the first one I did for my project ‘Interiors and Unreality’. It is based on a photograph taken at the Tudor mansion ‘Paycockes’, in Coggeshall.
My idea was to paint a scene with an intense, dreamlike atmosphere, and a sense of foreboding. I liked the idea of focusing on the doorway as a symbol of suspense, a place where anything could lie around the corner.
Although most of ‘Night Door’ was painted quickly, I found the far right-hand side of the picture a challenge. I wasn’t happy with that corner, so left it unfinished for about a month, before coming up with the idea of painting over the area I didn’t like with an amorphous black form. This form, I thought, could also represent a creeping black shadow stealing in from the edge of the canvas, as well as being a comment on the materiality of the painting itself.
The idea of ‘unreality’ is related to the idea of the Uncanny, which I looked at in my dissertation. This is a Freudian term referring to something which is familiar, yet unfamiliar, and whose familiarity makes its unfamiliar aspect all the more unsettling.
This is something which I believe applies particularly well to interiors, since they are a part of the everyday and therefore people expect images of them to be very comfortable, ‘safe’ pictures.
In this project I aim to turn this idea on its head by creating uncanny interiors which are ‘unreal’ in appearance,and unpredictable.
