Daphne Todd's Last Portrait of Mother

Daphne Todd's painting "Last Portrait of Mother" has just won the BP Portrait Award. 

There's been a mixed reaction to this painting. It only struck me as I was talking to Daphne earlier that seeing a dead body isn't the cultural norm for many people.

But here in Ireland we make an art form of it.

The Irish Wake is a cultural phenomenon. The deceased comes back to the house, takes up centre stage, there's tea, sandwiches, sometimes alcohol, there used to be plates of cigarettes passed around, there are stories and prayers. It's a social occasion. 

Daphne says she had a very understanding undertaker who let her sit with her dead mother. For three days after she died, Daphne sat and painted her. In a funny way she said it became social too.

She could hear the stone masons in another room whistling while they carved headstones. The undertakers would put her name in the pot for the tea break. But she couldn't bring herself to drink her tea and eat her kit-kat in front of her mother and would leave the room.

Mirrors in a wake house are usually covered or their faces turned to the wall. 

With "Last Portrait of Mother", Daphne Todd uncovers the mirror, and reflects her dead mother back to the viewer. In doing so she's breaking one of the last Western cultural taboos - staring into the face of death.