Yuko Nasu explores how images affect and influence us this through remembered portraits, often based on images from the media relating to stories that affected her. One portrait is of Raoul Moat as a cute young child, a baby-faced tabloid image whose tragic contrast to the adult’s reality resonated with the artist. In translating the memory to painting, the fractured innocence of the child and the sad portent of the man become bound together in her sweeping gestural marks. The same applies to other tragic figures from the papers, such as Baby P and an anonymous solider killed in Afghanistan. Through recreating and remembering these images in her painting, Yuko looks to tap into the raw emotions that we come to associate with a powerful image, and how we appropriate images in very personal ways.
