‘I tried to capture her inner world – but I couldn’t’: Tom de Freston paints his pregnant, naked wife | coloring

‘T“The subject comes with huge baggage and I love that,” says Tom de Freston. The painter and I are in his studio in a village outside Oxford, surrounded by nude photographs of his wife, the novelist Kieran Millwood Hargrave. “I wanted to ask: What does it mean for an artist to look at a female figure? Where is the agency’s headquarters located?

We were talking about Titian’s “Poesie” series, and how those paintings — commissioned by the most powerful man in the world at the time, King Philip II of Spain — dramatize the nude female body. “Clearly there are other things going on in them… I think Titian often urges morality and strength,” de Freston says.

Titian’s works are a central inspiration for the works shown as part of Poíēsis, De Freston’s first major exhibition at the Varvara Roza Galleries in London. He raised some of Titian’s figures on his own canvases, playing with the idea of ​​the male gaze.

These large-scale paintings are juxtaposed with Melwood Hargrave’s paintings of various stages of pregnancy, which were created when the couple suffered seven pregnancy losses before the birth of their daughter Coral in 2023. De Freston wrote about miscarriages – and Titian – in his famous book Strange Bodies, but these paintings were not initially intended to be displayed, but rather were merely a way to process his grief. “It was as if the studio was my space to work on things beyond language, without burdening Kieran with it.”

It was also an act of compassion. Over the years, de Freston has drawn Melwood Hargrave in a range of mythological forms, but it is the story of Eurydice and Orpheus that resonated most: their inaccessibility, his need to be looked at, questions about the distances between men and women and of course the feeling of being on the threshold of an underworld of grief and loss, with the hope of a pregnancy that results in a live birth.

You can’t deny the male gaze in these works: it’s there. “You’re trying to get into this character, or into their invisible inner world,” he explains. “And even though you’re intimately connected to them, you can’t.” In other words, the inaccessibility of the subject is the point.

Despite efforts to reframe it, the dynamic between the male artist and his muse still holds a strong influence in the minds of many people, but the relationship between de Freston and Melwood Hargrave is not one of ‘active artist and passive subject’. But she is cooperative. “Her voice is very present in the work,” says de Freston.

“This has not been brought up,” agreed Melwood Hargrave, when we spoke on the phone a few days later. “All from photos I took at home throughout my pregnancy.” I asked her if going public with this intimate relationship seemed in any way exposed. “When he first talked to me about using these images, I was so excited, because this is the most beautiful work I have ever seen from Tom,” she says. “They don’t have sex. They are worshiped and cared for, and you can feel the love in them.”

Explorations of pregnancy, and especially miscarriage, are still very rare in the visual arts. De Freston has made a bold attempt at empathy and has succeeded in capturing this mixture of sadness and hope. Moreover, they log valuable time. “They feel like elegies,” says Millwood Hargrave. “I think any painting feels like a kind of mourning work anyway, because you’re trying to capture something that’s gone. We were so ecstatic and so scared about it.” [last] Pregnancy.”

When baby Coral arrived, de Freston says, “I took a breath, and immediately felt as if the whole world had somehow opened up.” He was afraid of becoming a father because of the impact it would have on his work. Instead, he was overcome with a feeling of wonder and connection. “There has been a sudden shattering of the individual’s lie,” he says. “You have this sense of who you are as an artist, with the importance of your view of the world. And obviously, with a child, you become very aware of the interconnectedness of everything.”

The work he did before fatherhood was, by his own admission, very heavy. These paintings are much more optimistic. There’s a lot of magical thinking during pregnancy, especially when you’re experiencing losses. De Freston agrees: “I think they are rituals, like incantations. And in a kind of secular way, like prayers.”