A transcript for this episode can be found online, here.
The Scottish artist E.A. Hornel, who was part of the ‘Glasgow Boys’, is well-known for his work as a painter, and it is no secret that he used photographs as an aid to produce his paintings. However, his extensive collection of images, about 1,700 of them, has only recently been catalogued, and has never really been studied as a whole. This where my project comes in. 

My research focuses on three main aspects: working practice, gender, and otherness. Through this first aspect, I am hoping to bring about a better understanding of how the relatively new medium of photography informed Hornel’s own artistic practice. He created something akin to a database of re-usable poses and specific details, which he used in a way that could range from a sketchbook of sorts to a composition tool, although it is not sure to what extent. 

The collection, being mostly composed of photographs of women and girls with many of them non-European, depicts what would have been the ‘other’ for a white British man such as Hornel. By studying the many photographs he took (or had taken), and the few he chose to collect, my aim is to shed some light on his conceptions about gender and otherness, and to explore how they were expressed visually in his photographs and his paintings. 

In the context of my research, I put up the exhibition E. A. Hornel: A Painter Behind the Camera, to visually discuss some of the above point. It is visible in Drum Castle, Aberdeenshire, from the 1st of May to the 19th of December 2021.