New Romantics

Lisa Rawlinson

New Romantics

Could That Be possible? 2018 | Gouache on paper | 16.13" x 12.25"

February 5, 2018

“And I find it kind of funny

I find it kind of sad

The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."

—Tears for Fears, Mad World

These are the kind of lyrics that ruled my formative years. There were other genres, some of which were less prone to sentimentality on the surface, but when you stripped away the carefully constructed image of metal guitar gods or whatever it happened to be, it amounted to the same: the kind of earnestness that eventually became taboo. It's debatable exactly when and where that happened. There were grumblings of cynicism flying under the radar for decades, but somewhere in my young adulthood irony and cleverness began to rule the day, and any artist or musician who dared wear their heart on their sleeve would find it quickly skewered.

My New Romantics series reaches back to that time, making use of the aesthetics of the day—a swash of paint, bold magentas paired with flat blacks, and lips everywhere—as I use each painting to reflect on the almost 47 years I've spent in this mad world, and all of the cultural conditioning, the mixed messages, the supposed to's, the expectations that were so normalized that they went largely unnoticed. These are focused on relationships, on love and betrayal and heartbreak, and the worst of the lot, all those times when I accepted bullshit that now I would never accept because, well, that's just how things were. The musings expand out from there into the gendered roles we play (or don't), part of my reaction to the tidal wave of ah-ha moments that have come rushing in with the Me Too movement. It's all connected, what we look for in our connections with others, what we accept or don't, the way others view and treat us.

The paintings are quick and in-the-moment. It's a gut reaction. There's no over thinking or conceptualizing the cleverest way to convey an idea. Some take their names from song lyrics or titles, others from the scenario that prompted their creation. Some, like Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble (see my Art page), act as a spell, borrowing witchcraft and a slightly altered line from Macbeth to celebrate the ways in which women have asserted their power across the ages, and to seal all the things which no longer serve me into a bubble so it can float away, pop, and cease to exist.

The series pays homage to the forces that shaped me, and so many of us, but also reinvents those forces. It takes ownership of them. It takes what it can use and discards the rest, like waking up from a dream in which you've died to something new, something as yet undefined but something where we have more autonomy, where we can speak our feelings again, and do and be whatever the fuck we want.

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