Love and loneliness of a young mother

Like many of the figures painted by Glasgow artist Lorna Robertson (b 1967), the central woman in this work calls to mind a remembered ideal of feminine freedom, chic and exuberance. With her Mary Jane heels and impassive face, she could be an illustrated figure from a 1950s fashion magazine, or perhaps a jauntily dressed mannequin in a department store window from the same period.

At the same time, the work’s title (Love and loneliness of a young mother) and layers of diffused colour complicate its apparent lyricism. Is the painting an image of how this mother sees herself? Of how she dreams of being? Is the fantasy real and reachable, or fugitive? Is the work’s apparent happiness in fact a kind of self-protection – a way of keeping loneliness and melancholy at bay? Like Linda Marrinon and Jenny Watson, Australian artists in the Art Gallery’s collection, Robertson discovers tenderness, compassionate humour, and emotional complexity in supposed stereotypes of femininity.

Though expansive in scale, this painting reveals her interest in more intimate (and traditionally ‘feminine’) media – in the lightness of drawing, the layering of collage, and the lyrical openness of watercolour. ‘A painting is a kind of space where you can stay’, she said recently. ‘Somewhere you can go, similar to a piece of music. Paintings take away the weight of words. I enjoy the silence of paintings. I want them to be open.’