I'm painting a series of nine paintings based on positivist quotes, in which the images are in contrast with, and therefore a protest against, the quotations.
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| Blood-spattered swastika |
This week, as a part of this series I started painting Adolf Hitler, and I didn't like it. Normally, when I paint a person's portrait I start feeling closer to my model. As I paint, I reflect on what sort of thoughts and dreams they might have, whether they're happy...
Inevitably, that's what happened between me and mr Hitler. I started wondering about his human side, had he ever been nice to anyone, felt love, tenderness? Had he ever felt fear or remorse about the millions of murders on his conscience? In short, painting him forced me to try and imagine what it was like to be him, to see him as a human being. Not what you might call a pleasant experience, in fact it made my skin crawl.
We're not supposed to look upon people who do monstrous things as people. It brings it too close to home. We're supposed to safely categorize them as monsters so we can believe they're nothing like us. When you're not a neo-Nazi you're not supposed to look upon Hitler as human, and so I felt guilty and sick. But it also made me wonder. Hitler was not alone, he had so many followers and helpers. Were all those people monsters? That's an awful number of monsters walking the earth.
Of course Hitler was human, with hopes and dreams. That is exacly the point of my painting. It is based on Walt Disney's quote: 'What you can dream, you can do'. Hitler had a dream he proved he could do. The monstrous thing is: one person's dream can turn out to be other people's nightmare.
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