Artist George Kan Explores Longing, Attachment, and Childhood Nostalgia
Artist George Kan explores longing, attachment, and childhood nostalgia
Ofuckinell, 2020, Oil on Card
My mum recently found a letter she had sent to her mum in the late nineties. I appear in it. Picture me – aged 4 – teetering around fondling an aching ear. Apparently, though the ear is getting better, I frequently remind everyone, just in case people were getting the wrong idea, “it’s not fine yet”.
My mum says in the letter she thinks I just like the Calpol. Growing pains. Imagine me: like a little consumptive, swooning on a chaise-longue (we never had a chaise-longue, though I always wished we had) murmuring my ailments like a Noel Coward character, in the hopes Mummy might administer a little more pink syrup.
“It’s not fine... yet” The suspense: what a great way to keep an audience on their toes. I doubt I ever pronounced my ear cured - only interested instead in the prolonged narration of an endless and slow recovery. I was growing to be quite a pain.
I Love All My Friends, 2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas
In my paintings I’m interested in longing, attachment, and the role images play in both: recurring thoughts, desires, exchanged gestures, places we return to, places we look away from. Little things we use to give a relationship shape, or traces of relationships past. A little calpol from mother.
The Girl Is Invented, 2021, Oil on canvas
And You Ask Where The Romance Went, 2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas
A second image from my mum’s aforementioned letter (if you thought I’d have talked about the paintings more by now, I’m sorry - I’m just keeping the audience in suspense - a pain, I know): me, this time on the school-run, telling my mum she needs to find me a new school. Why? I say I don’t like the colours of the building “they’re all brown and white”.
Queer childhood: The mummy’s boy who wants to stay at home - perhaps, though not entirely, because of the way the other kids look at him, the things they say, the things they do, or maybe the things the other mums say. This was before queer kids were a thing - though that’s not to say it’s all rosy now (“it’s not fine yet”). These are the growing pains of growing up different. Of wanting to be at home when school was a battlefield. Some calpol for the wounds.
But is there a queerer way to denounce school than to dismiss the architecture? To criticize the suburban use of white plaster and brick? (I can still picture the school - a bungalow somewhere out in picket fence wilderness of New Jersey.) Whining from the chaise: how, if only the school had invested in a more baroque exterior, I might finally put my socks and shoes on.
If you thought I would finally get to the paintings, this must be disappointing. A pain, I know.
Untitled, 2020, Oil on wood