MIRROR OVERFLOWING, 1976
Enamel and gold on board. 11 x 9¼in. (28.7 x 24cm.)
Signed with the monogram ’76.
Inscribed on the reverse with the artist’s name, the title of the work and the date. With the Paul label
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
Chadwick (1985) discussed the importance of the self-portrait in surrealist art. She noted that make and female artists adopted different strategies in their attempts to resolve the polarities of inner and outer realities. Male surrealists, asserted Chadwick, ‘overcame the polarity by projecting inner reality, in the form of desire, onto an external being; woman artists often turned to the self-portrait as a device for initiating the same dialogue between inner and outer reality’ p. 92.
The mirror in this painting is a small oval one, of the sort historically used by women to observe themselves in order to adjust the appearance they present to the outside world. It encompasses the duality of the user as both observer and observed.
A mirror can do no more than reflect the light that touches its surface. The reflection in Mirror Overflowing, however, is not constrained by the laws of optics, but spills over the edge of the frame and begins to seep down the handle. It is in the tradition of La Condition Humaine and other works by Magritte in which the picture appears to match exactly – one imagines – the scene that appears behind it; a play on visibility and concealment. The image that Colquhoun’s mirror cannot contain, however, is blank. How can a mirror reflect absence, and how can that absence be so large that it cannot be contained but must overflow the frame? Perhaps, like the mirror of the scryer, it is blank so that the viewer may project into it their boundless imagination.
Reference
Chadwick, W. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Thames and Hudson, London 1985.