Hitchcock’s Blondes

Paintings
In this new series of paintings I have chosen to celebrate the female leads of ten of his movies. As more than one critic and film-goer has noticed, there is a definite Hitchcockian female archetype, one he sought to embody over and over in an array of different women over a period of more than forty years - from Margaret Lockwood and Ingrid Bergman to Kim Novak and Tipi Hedren. These women are inevitably blonde and they are definitely ‘obscure objects of desire’ - alluring, but also sometimes rather frightening. In fact, they seem often to be like pagan goddesses, and around them great and dangerous things happen. In my paintings I selected gold as the appropriate colour. It conjures up the glamour of the movies, the blondeness of the stars, but also, in an entirely different context, the transcendent quality of the religious icon. I welcome the contradiction: a rather kitschy subject meets an exalted tradition in art. The typography in which the names appear is that used in the titles of the specific films from which I have selected Hitchcock’s blondes.
Margaret Lockwood in ‘The Lady Vanishes’ (1938)
Joan Fontaine in ‘Rebecca’ (1940)
Ingrid Bergman in ‘Notorious’ (1946)
Ann Todd in ‘The Paradine Case’ (1947)
Anne Baxter in ‘I Confess’ (1953)
Grace Kelly in ‘To Catch a Thief’ (1955)
Kim Novak in ‘Vertigo’ (1958)
Eva Marie Saint in ‘North By Northwest’ (1959)
Janet Leigh in ‘Psycho’ (1960)
‘Tippi’ Hedren in ‘Marnie’ (1964)

 

 

 

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