I had planned to paint a series of works about children in war many years ago but the time to do this never seemed right. Most of my career was dedicated to paintings with some sort of satirical comment about society, and whereas war and satire marry easily together, children in war cannot be treated, to my mind, in any form linked to humour. The time was therefore not ripe.
The research for this group of paintings isn’t recent but most of the information I came across was of such a heart breaking nature that it took me a long time to absorb and detach myself from it, so as to avoid the risk of treating this particularly difficult subject with unnecessary, and tone-lowering, melodramatics. The showing of broken bodies, tears and gore had, perhaps, some sense prior to the advent of the camera. Since then, there has been a tendency to document wars with clinical precision and my intention wasn’t simply to repeat on canvas what is already shown so clearly, and so well, on photograph.
Initially, my project concerned Polish children during WWII – those of the Christian faith - who were deported by the Third Reich in their thousands and who not only never returned, but whose memory has virtually evaporated from history. Apart from some small – and unnoticed – plaque or memorial here and there, the fate of these small people has been erased. Admittedly, it is understandable that once the world exit-ed one of its most barbaric periods, survivors would try to forget all the evil, and start living again. However, such total eradication from memory is, perhaps, tolerable where it is general.
