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Life Sized Lead Soldiers

This new body of work is based on a collection of lead soldiers my father assembled over the course of his life. I was surprised when I inherited some of them to see how many depicted Arab and North African soldiers. There are Zouaves, Saracenes, Mamaluks and Ottoman Turks. It struck me as strange that we had been demonizing the Arab world forever. That even in child’s play the exotic could take on a menacing and evil aspect.

My first instinct was to look closer. I took macro photographs of the figures with raking light to heighten their effect and to exaggerate the distortions in the figures. I then used the photographs as a starting point for a series of paintings that would be larger than life. The scale was important to me because I wanted to reverse the roles of viewer and subject and have the toys loom over us. A toy Buckingham Palace guard can tower over the viewer like an equestrian sculpture. The backgrounds have varied from suggestions of landscapes to more familiar still life shelf settings. They can appear almost real and at other times more in keeping with the sculpture as still life tradition.

The most exciting aspect of the blow-ups was the ways in which the figures became distorted by scale. Hands and feet appeared to have been mangled, the pockmarks of missing paint looked like shrapnel wounds. Faces that seemed acceptable as miniatures became grotesques when enlarged, swords could become chain saws, rifles could become candy canes. What was serious appeared absurd and the innocent became morbid. Riflemen teetering on their wobbly stands became a metaphor for the instability of colonialist thinking and the entire project took on the feeling of some horrific déjà vu. It’s frightening to think that so much animosity could be embedded in a child’s toy.

Shrapnel

2007
Acrylic on Canvas
208 x 134 cm

Drumbeat

2008
Acrylic on Canvas
165 x 208 cm

Fleur de Lis

2008
Acrylic on Canvas
208 x 142 cm

Doughboy

2008
Acrylic on Canvas
50 x 40 cm

Tassel

2008
Acrylic on Canvas
208 x 208 cm

Workhorse

2007
Acrylic on Canvas
208 x 208 cm

Bayonet

2008
Acrylic on Canvas
121 x 162 cm