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About Elpida

SHAKESPEARE DREAMS


An Exhibition of Paintings by Elpida Georgiou

sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust and the Department of English, School of Humanities, and Insitute of Psychiatry, King’s College London



The genesis of this exhibition was a painting I made many years ago entitled ‘Freud Acting Hamlet’. I have always been interested in Freud’s analyses of Shakespeare’s characters, not least for his misinterpretations, of ‘Hamlet’ in particular. Hamlet uses drama to accuse his uncle of the murder of his father and delivers a speech on acting to the players (who surely have rather more dramatic experience than he does). Hamlet stresses that they must not overact. I saw Freud as himself an actor, on a world stage, an actor not averse to posturing, and so, in my painting, I cast Freud as Hamlet – more from intuition than analysis, but that’s the way I work.

Busy with other projects, and life in general, I didn’t follow this up in any systematic way until I was introduced to Gordon McMullan, Professor of Shakespeare studies at Kings College London, and to Brian Hurwitz, D'Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine & the Arts. Kings prides itself on promoting interdisciplinary studies and especially in finding ways to bring together the very different disciplines of the humanities and medical science. They were fascinated by the possibility of combining three academic disciplines - painting, literature and psychoanalysis – and Gordon submitted a successful application to The Leverhulme Trust for me to become artist-in-residence of the English Department. Only writers (as you might expect in the context of an English department) had held this post before, so to bring in a visual artist was a new development and very exciting. There is great competition for this prestigious award and I felt honoured to be offered the post of artist-in-residence.

I received the Leverhulme award in the same week I was made homeless. My daughter had no secondary school to go to, and I found myself before a judge at the High Court, answering charges brought by my ex-husband. This, naturally, delayed my completion of the series. I am very grateful that King’s and the Leverhulme Trust had the patience to continue supporting my project.

My background isn’t in literature: what I do is paint. Something happens inside me: I size a canvas and soon my body, brushes, paints, turps and the rest, especially my eye, are changing something, creating something which wasn’t there before. The challenge was to combine my instincts with reading Shakespeare’s plays and their subsequent interpretations by critics of many persuasions.

One entry point is dreaming. Everyone dreams, and that’s where the Unconscious makes itself most obvious (though its tricks are manifold). There are many dreamlike sequences in Shakespeare, and some psychoanalytic critics have suggested that the plays represent the dreams of his characters or even of Shakespeare himself. I doubt this: in fact, it’s preposterous. But it is one way into the work and, while remaining sceptical, this conceit helped my intuition bear fruit on canvas.

So I have called the exhibition Shakespeare Dreams. It’s an ambiguous title. The paintings might, for instance, represent my dreams of what Shakespeare might have been dreaming. Or what you will.

Students from the English department visited my studio and many requested that I execute paintings of their favourite plays. They seemed intrigued by the concept of Shakespeare’s plays being interpreted in a non-verbal form. I took their ideas on board, but you can’t satisfy everyone. I hope they’ll be at the exhibition to see how it turned out.

Besides Hamlet, my main subjects in this exhibition are: King Lear, Lady Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Puck and Bottom in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Ophelia, Malvolio and Falstaff.

I don’t like to talk about my paintings too much. That can become prescriptive and authoritarian. It is up to the viewer to create their own interpretations of what is before them. But I do like my art to be challenging. Though I have made pleasant paintings over the years, few people could live with my Lady Macbeth.

My painting of Malvolio is quite literal:

Her C’s, her U’s, her T’s; and thus makes she her great P’s…

Well, you know what that means. I just make Malvolio’s unconscious desires more explicit; and add in Lear’s ‘whoreson zed’, jettisoned to the floor as Malvolio spruces himself up. Does the idea that women piss still shock?

My Lear depicts the cracked king jettisoning Cordelia (as a plastic doll) over his shoulder. He’s so choleric, he’s lost the plot. Some might infer the painting was influenced by my problems with my ex-husband. Others might say it was influenced by reading King Lear.

Titus Andronicus: it has been claimed that Titus is the closest Shakespeare came to figuring a tragic hero in the Classical mode. Elizabethan and Jacobean theatregoers loved gore, and so has every generation before or since. The most important cultural medium of the past 90 years is film; and one of its key genres is horror. The play is perfectly set up for an intelligent horror movie. For me, the main thing was violence. And my response to the play was to paint a violent picture.

A lighter moment is provided by my Puck and Bottom. I owe a lot to Renaissance painters, and they knew about pastoral.

Shylock: this is a tetraptych, and complex. The influences are painters like Goya, Velasquez, El Greco. The play depicts conflict along religious divides. I wonder: Who’s the martyr? Who’s the victim?

Falstaff’s Diet [?] is different to all the other paintings. It’s a still-life. You are what you eat, and Falstaff ate plenty. He ate whatever he could lay hands on. Now there’s an obsession about what everyone should eat and how much.

Ophelia. Ophelia dreams she’s in Hamlet’s dream. In which he rejects her. Or maybe I dream the whole thing.



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Working with Gordon McMullan, Brian Hurwitz and others was a pleasure and an education. My studio is always open to the students from King’s and I am very grateful to Gordon, to Antonella Surdi – who worked tirelessly to make the exhibition work – and to Professor Jack Price at the Institute of Psychiatry – who helped make the space available for the show – and to all who made this exhibition possible. And I am of course immensely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the residency.


Elpida November 2008

Game Over

2007/8
190 x 130

Freud acting Hamlet

2006/8
oil on canvas
190 x 130

balloon

oil on canvas
1.82 x 3.048

milkmaid

oil on canvas
1.82 x 1.52

pissing on blue

oil on canvas
1.82 x 1.52

pissing on orange

oil on canvas
1.82 x 1.52

pot

oil on canvas
1.2 x 2.43

fatima

oil on canvaas

victims

charcoal on canvas
4x12 feet

Midsummer nights dream

2008

game over

2005/6

last

2000

Lady Macbeth: Tormented soul

2008

Milk Maid

1995/8

Mother

King Lear

2008

Malvolio Dreaming of Olivia

2008

Titus Andronicus

2008

The Kiss