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Printing the Family Artist Anita Klein chooses to focus on the more everyday aspects of life - making breakfast, taking a bath, gardening. As Sarah Woolman discovered, the result is an intimate portrait of domestic life with her partner Nige and their children...  Nige Tires of Reading |
Anita Klein doesn’t want to paint mirror images. She wants to paint portraits which come 'from inside'. So for her, the most obvious subjects are her family.
 Summer in the Garden |
Anita uses oil paints and because the paintings take so long to dry, she works on several at once and hangs them around the house. She says, 'a good way of deciding whether a painting is good or not is to hang it over the television when you’re watching Eastenders'.
Anita’s subject is the minutiae of life. The smaller and more insignificant the event, the better. She paints, she says, 'the life that happens while you’re busy doing something else: having a cup of tea, getting into the bath, waving goodbye to your children when they go to school.' Her aim is to celebrate the things that she would miss if her domestic life suddenly disappeared.
 Nige Examines his Zoom Lens |
Her husband, Nige is Anita’s muse and is the subject of a good many of her paintings. He’s become a bit of celebrity in his own right, particularly among women with husbands also called Nigel. But Nige isn’t quite sure he always gets recorded in the best light.
He concedes though that that he does get something out of it. He sees it as a sort of visual diary of "all the quiet little moments" that happen when he’s out at work.
And Anita’s paintings have given her an insight into other people’s lives. She says, 'I always think that I have the only husband who sits taking camera’s apart in bed'. He’s become a sort of Nigel for all seasons. Although Anita’s Nige isn’t quite sure that all husbands do nude yoga in the bedroom.
Anita’s daughters, Leila and Maia, don’t really like art galleries very much having been dragged around so many by their mother. But it’s a bit more interesting when they see pictures of themselves on the walls. It can be quite weird to see people looking at paintings of them, and the naked pictures of their parents 'freak them out' a bit.
 The Red Shoes |
But like it or not, Anita says her family are absolutely central to her life. She says "for as long as they’re around, they’re going to be in the pictures". So they’d better get used to it.
MORE INFORMATION
You can see more of Anita's work on her website anitaklein.com
And her work is on show at the Advanced Graphics Gallery in Deptford, South London until 25th October.
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