Some years ago I sent an invitation to my email subscribers. Send me a photograph, I asked – or, better, three photographs, arranged together on a wall or a tabletop.
One person – I will call her NJ – sent me three photographs of her father.
I drew the three photos together, in the same painting.
On the left, taller, is her father as a boy. Maybe ten years old, standing outdoors in a pale shirt and dark trousers. Formal, alone.
Top right, warm colours – reds and oranges – her father as a young man, holding his baby daughter, NJ, at what looks like a family gathering. Other people can be seen in the background.
Bottom right, in cooler purples and blues, her father a few years later. He is holding one small daughter; two more are close by. Cars behind them.
Between the middle and bottom pictures, something in the family had come apart. NJ told me some of it, but it’s not my story to tell.
What the drawing catches is the same person three times, at three moments – child, new father, father in a moment of loss. One person, one page, contains multitudes.
I keep coming back to this device, of a person shown at more than one age in a single frame. The younger self is not somebody else. The younger self is somebody the older self carries, whether the older self wants to or not.
This is one of the portraits in Contain Multitudes, my show at Burgh House, Hampstead, 18-23 August 2026.