June 22nd 2013

Having worked with Josie McCoy for 12 or 13 years now, I’ve seen her painting evolve over this time from the Eastenders characters she showed in her Central St Martin’s final year show in the late 90s to the simply stunning portraits of Hollywood Sirens she’s producing today.

These four new pieces are among my favourite of Josie’s works to date. Raimunda III features Penelope Cruz as the leading character in the Spanish film ‘Volver’ where she plays a working-class woman named Raimunda who goes to great lengths to look after her teenage daughter. For me, Cruz’s distant stare is the first thing you notice about this piece - shortly followed of course by her stunning beauty - as you wonder what has caused her to be in this dazed state, her hair bedraggled and loosely tied back from her face. This painting perfectly captures Raimunda’s history, her story, her journey through life. Isabel Creo Blue is based on Rachel Weisz’s character in the film ‘The Fountain’ which sees the British actress play the lead role (alongside Hugh Jackman) in three stories about love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence that span over a thousand years. Instead of gazing into the distance like Raimunda, Isabel makes direct eye contact with the viewer, her arresting glare making a lasting impression.

In Sabrina, Josie takes the leading character from a 1954 film of the same name as her subject, who is played by one of the most iconic faces in the history of cinema, Audrey Hepburn. Cast alongside Humphrey Bogart - one of the leading actors of the time - Hepburn plays the daughter of a rich family’s chauffeur. Unnoticed by her father’s employers her whole life, she attracts their attention after attending culinary school in Paris and returning as a sophisticated young woman, subsequently ending up in a love triangle with two brothers. In this painting Josie perfectly captures the character’s hidden innocence as she gazes out from behind the façade of a perfectly made-up face, sculpted hair and diamond earrings.

The fourth painting, Jane Pannell VI, sees McCoy using similar hues of blue and lilac as she does in the previous pieces but this time her subject is a real person rather than a character played by an actor. Having painted her friend Jane’s portrait a number of times, there’s a definite indication of personality present here, again illustrating Josie’s extraordinary ability to portray character, emotion and feeling from the perfectly blended surface of the canvas. Sometimes the subject is real, sometimes fictional and blurring these boundaries is all part of the process that makes these works the real McCoy.

See the works in more detail along with other pieces by Josie here.

Creative Director