The Souvenir series were originally considered as background details for larger works, reference ideas I had collected to use elsewhere, until it dawned on me that I enjoyed their own intrinsic narrative they each contained. The very thing that attracted me to these images was the story, the memory, the history, real or imagined, that they triggered in my head.
The Souvenirs are a visual diary of my travel and observation, a record for myself, marking my delight in a new angle on a familiar scene. Applying the same format gives each image equal billing, all filtered through the same blue aperture on a 16” x 20” canvas, where the universal border removes them from being a landscape per se to being a deliberately painted scene, a memory, a still, a quote.
This is a continuing series, and this exhibition in the Ashford is the second showing of a group of these Souvenirs together.
James Hanley RHA.
