About this artwork
This painting has an eerie quality which is accentuated by the unnatural light shining from the background onto the character’s face. Flannigan’s subjects are not direct portraits, but fictional portrayals of familiar, middle-class individuals whose eccentricities and flaws are used to reflect on aspects of contemporary society. These wry and penetrating observations often create highly believable characters. Flannigan does not use photographs directly, but instead builds up her paintings from many different sources along with her own vivid imagination. This painting was made the same year as her well-known portrait of a father and son titled Just Like Daddy, 1998, and the two paintings share the same unsettling, green-tinted atmosphere.
Updated before 2020
see media-
artist:Moyna Flannigan (born 1963) Scottish
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title:Isobel
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date created:1998
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materials:Oil on canvas
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measurements:Framed: 55.20 x 60.40 x 3.20 cm
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object type:
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credit line:Purchased with the Iain Paul Fund 1999
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accession number:GMA 4307
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gallery:
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artwork photographed by:Antonia Reeve
Moyna Flannigan
Moyna Flannigan
Moyna Flannigan is best known for her fictional portraits based on wry and penetrating observations of middle-class society. Born in Kirkcaldy, Flannigan studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. After a period of painting in an abstract style...