The Art of Intelligent Ageing

Fionna Carlisle’s portraits reveal what is often hidden. Prolonged in their gestation and fulfilment, they are both explorations and meditations on those essentials of personality that lie behind the outward surfaces of her subjects. These explorations, graphic and often colourful, record a relationship between the painter and the individual who sits for her, that is established as something equal and undemanding. What is revealed has a kind of magic that can surprise the sitter, but also the artist as well. No artist ever knows exactly where they are going when they set off. 

This series of portraits of individuals from the two Lothian Birth Cohorts
of 1921 and 1936 (worlds that seems so distant) are a particular fruit of that ability to engage and sympathise with her subjects and to commit her own profoundest feelings to giving a new kind of life to those who have already made a long journey and which has inevitably left its marks. Though unswerving in their honesty, such is their truth to the inner core – that essence that remains even in old age – of the individuals portrayed that they radiate a life-affirming optimism. 

A scientific project, of course, provides the basis for these portraits; but, in
a way that is instinctual rather than scientific (though another set of cognitive skills, the painter’s, lies beneath these images), the artist provides us with a rare validation of humankind. The scientific part of this validation is also encompassed by a number of portraits of those who have worked with the members of the cohorts, their eagerness and sympathy shining in the new light they have discovered. 

With her unique insights, from the everyday lives, humdrum or exciting, of all of these individuals, Fionna Carlisle’s portraits take us on the endless quest for meaning that we all make. But the means to these ends are really quite simple: a get-together in a nondescript room and the unfurling of a large roll of paper to be cut to size and then fixed to a drawing-board. Then follow those seemingly endless markings, plucked from the brush, as it were, not in any random way but each carefully (though often rapidly) considered. These markings seek a resolution in a way that is almost lyrical, facts accumulating, but always more than facts, seeking and finding a kind of music embedded in time – the present singing of the past. No mundane or distracting symbols fill the background (an unhappy demand in many commissioned portraits) but sometimes ongoing thoughts are pencilled here and left as part of the unravelling. 

Yet as the various truths, of what is observed and what is understood, emerge in the bright image, that sheet of paper is allowed to retain its ordinary, uneven vitality. It remains
a sheet of paper, sometimes even casting its own shadow, but is alsoat the same time wonderfully transformed. That strange boundary has been crossed, between something that is fabricated from quotidian materials and the new and unassailable life that has appeared. 

Duncan Thomson 

Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 1982 to 1997