FOREWORD: OUT OF WORK ANGELS BY HAMISH BLAKELY
Ask yourself, where would you rather be: in Heaven, with all those vacuously grinning robots and choirs trilling night and day forever; or in Hell, among ingenious, swashbuckling and dissolute sinners? No contest. Hell and Satan get all the best lines. Whether it‘s Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Devil is always the most charismatic character, and with so enviable and exciting a life. Those condemned to Hell are a far better class of person; real people, failures, those who lapse and repeat their mistakes, and so often just for the hell of it. Give me any time Hamish Blakely’s grubby Apollo busking with his lyre in Baker Street tube over the suited commuter on the daily trek to and fromMetroland tedium. And give me any day of the week the fallen woman over the nun. There’s no room left in secular modern life for angels. Disaffection with religion means that few believe in such whimsies any more. Priestly threats, scriptural warnings, eternal damnation… we’re no longer that stupid. We’ve seen through all that ridiculous hocus-pocus and have grown to live with our imperfections and shortcomings. We let ourselves down, we let others down, but we forgive one another – it’s that simple. And that’s why Hamish’s pictures are so satisfying. When judged by the standards of the angelic, we failures are in good company here. His beautiful people are our soul mates. For most of us, burdened to breaking point with daily cares, there’s too much mileage and enjoyment in the sort of errant conduct which might politely be described as unangelic. Hamish depicts the prospect of sinfulness, the piquancy of temptation. This makes the pictures exciting because we know already by the look of resignation on these would-be angels’ faces that the battle is lost, the towel thrown in. They are already fallen and are going to do what is on their minds. Yes, Hamish’s angels feel guilty about their unholy thoughts and temptations, but it won’t stop them.
Our collective lack of ability to meet the standards required of angels is the subject of these pictures. These are not the pouting, simpering bores of Raphael and Perugino – thank god. They are modern art’s modern women, but with doubts, disintegrating haloes and delicious vices to accumulate. They could so easily pass as madonnas and ecstatic saints but they aren’t going to be. They will instead be exemplary, imperfect followers in the footsteps of Adam and Eve. How tedious life would be without this free will to behave badly. To get beyond the weary angel stereotype Hamish uses our knowledge of film posters and glamour imagery, of scent and jewellery billboard advertising, and of commonplace religious iconography. He sows the seeds of doubt through a telling look or a seductive pose, a neckline just a shade too fetching, or that peremptory cigarette holder of the femme fatale. One of these ‘madonnas’ even adopts the infamous reverse-chair pose of Christine Keeler; an allusion whose significance many of Hamish’s fans will be too young to understand. But to the generation raised in the 1960s this pose itself signifies everything there is to know about permissiveness, sinfulness and liberation. All Hamish’s angels and goddesses are adorable precisely because they are defeated before they even begin acting. They are Mary Magdalenes: they believe in ideals but are prey to human frailties and desires. All those improbably large wings are just exaggerated symbols of the depth of their descent. So, I’m delighted Hamish is leading us into temptation, but only providing he doesn’t intend delivering us from evil.
David Lee Editor: The Jackdaw
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