{"id":314352,"date":"2025-11-26T07:24:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T07:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/314352\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T07:24:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T07:24:07","slug":"i-tried-to-capture-her-inner-world-but-couldnt-tom-de-freston-on-painting-his-wife-pregnant-and-nude-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/314352\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I tried to capture her inner world \u2013 but couldn\u2019t\u2019: Tom de Freston on painting his wife pregnant and nude | Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018The subject comes with huge baggage and I like that,\u201d says Tom de Freston. The painter and I are in his studio in a village outside Oxford, surrounded by nude portraits of his wife, the novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave<\/a>. \u201cI wanted to ask, \u2018What does it mean as a male artist to be looking at the female figure? And where does the agency sit?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

We have been talking about Titian\u2019s Poesie series<\/a>, how those paintings \u2013 commissioned by the most powerful man in the world at the time, King Philip II of Spain \u2013 fetishise the naked female body. \u201cObviously there\u2019s other things going on in them \u2026 I think Titian\u2019s often prodding at morality and power,\u201d De Freston says.<\/p>\n

Titian\u2019s works are a central inspiration for works on display as part of Po\u00ed\u0113sis, De Freston\u2019s first major exhibition at London\u2019s Varvara Roza Galleries. He has lifted some of Titian\u2019s figures on to his own canvases, playing with the idea of the male gaze.<\/p>\n

On the Edge of the Forest. Photograph: Tom de Freston\/Peter Mallet Photography<\/p>\n

These large-scale paintings are alongside those of Millwood Hargrave at various stages of pregnancy, created as the couple endured seven pregnancy losses before the birth of their daughter, Coral, in 2023. De Freston wrote about the miscarriages \u2013 and Titian \u2013 in his acclaimed book Strange Bodies, but these paintings were initially not intended to be exhibited, but were rather just a way of processing his own grief. \u201cIt was like the studio was my space to work through stuff that was beyond language, without burdening Kiran with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was also an act of empathy. Over the years, De Freston has painted Millwood Hargrave in a range of mythological guises, but it is the story of Eurydice and Orpheus that resonated the most: her unreachability, his need to look to her, questions about the distances between men and women and of course the feeling of being on the threshold of an underworld of grief and loss, hoping for a pregnancy resulting in a live birth.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t deny the male gaze in these works: it\u2019s there. \u201cYou\u2019re trying to get to this figure, or to their unseen internal world. And even though you\u2019re intimately connected to them, you can\u2019t,\u201d he explains. The subject\u2019s unreachability, in other words, is the whole point.<\/p>\n

Despite efforts to reframe it, the dynamic between a male artist and his female muse still holds powerful sway in many people\u2019s minds, but De Freston and Millwood Hargrave\u2019s relationship is not one of \u201cactive artist and passive subject\u201d. Rather, she is a collaborator. \u201cHer voice is hugely present in the work,\u201d says De Freston.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese aren\u2019t posed,\u201d agrees Millwood Hargrave, when we speak by phone a few days later. \u201cThey are all from photographs that he took in the domestic space throughout my pregnancies.\u201d I ask her if such intimacy being made public feels exposing in any way. \u201cWhen he first talked to me about using these photographs, I was just excited, because this body of work is the most beautiful I\u2019ve ever seen Tom create,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re not sexualised. They\u2019re worshipful and considered and you can feel the love in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both of Us Sorting Shadows, 2024. Photograph: Tom de Freston\/Peter Mallet Photography<\/p>\n

Explorations of pregnancy and especially of miscarriage still feel quite rare in visual art. De Freston has made a bold attempt at empathy and succeeded in capturing that mix of grief and hope. Furthermore, they record a time that is precious. \u201cThey do feel like elegies,\u201d says Millwood Hargrave. \u201cI think any painting feels like an act of mourning anyway, because you\u2019re trying to capture something that is gone. We were so ecstatic and scared in this [last] pregnancy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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When baby Coral arrived, De Freston says, \u201cshe took a breath, and it instantaneously felt like the whole world somehow unlocked.\u201d He had been scared to become a father because of the impact it might have on his work. Instead, he was flooded with a sense of wonder and connection. \u201cThere was a sudden shattering of the lie of the individual,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have this sense of you as this artist, with the importance of your vision of the world. And obviously, having a child, you become so intimately aware of the interconnectedness of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work he made before parenthood was, by his own admission, very heavy. These paintings are far more hopeful. A lot of magical thinking goes on in pregnancy, especially when you\u2019ve had losses. De Freston agrees: \u201cI think of them as ritualistic, like spells. And in a kind of secular way, like prayers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018The subject comes with huge baggage and I like that,\u201d says Tom de Freston. The painter and I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-314352","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}