Remember the time: Interview with Maidstone artist Louise Rieger
Kent artist looks beyond nostalgia to create artworks of strangers that we all recognise
Having spent years as a creative cog in kids’ TV show Art Attack with Neil Buchanan, Louise Rieger (@louise.rieger.artist) left Maidstone Studios to get back to her artistic roots. Looking back through her family’s old photographs, recreating them with oil on canvas, a theme formed and Louise began to be drawn to images that tell strangely relatable stories and evoke complex emotions.
But this isn’t just about nostalgia, it’s often a bittersweet remembering, describing a feeling of absence and drawing focus on a fond longing for something that is missing from the here and now. Totally captured by the work, and feeling like we knew half the people in the paintings (though of course we don’t), we caught up with Louise to find out more.
How would you describe your work to people?
Oh gosh, that’s a tricky one. Nostalgia is a good place to start, but it’s not the only thing that I’m aiming for. Obviously, it’s totally informed from my upbringing. The images that I choose are ones that relate to me and where I come from. But I kind of know that once I’ve committed those images to the canvas, people then see them through their own lens. And so it’s up to them how they see them.
Can you tell us where your images come from and why you choose certain images to work with?
I grew up in Chatham in the 70s and 80s, so a lot of the images I choose are from that area and from that time. I choose images either from my own family albums or other people’s, or I find photos and use them as a direct reference for the paintings that I come up with.
I try not to think too hard about why I choose them. It’s very much an emotional response. It can be a photo of an interior or a person or a place, and I just go with it because I don’t want to lose whatever that thing was that sang out to me.
It’s different now in the digital age - images can be edited or just taken again - but back then the camera caught all the elements in one shot and they had to be kept in.
Absolutely. Often it’s the snaps that would probably have been considered a bit rubbish, the ones that in this day and age you just delete immediately because they’re out of focus or overexposed. They’re the ones that I find the most interesting because they’re the true snapshots, aren’t they? They’re the ones where people aren’t particularly posed, or you’ve caught somebody off-guard. They tell a certain story, they’re the ones that you relate to.
The reason I do what I do with those throwaway snaps is I like to draw people’s attention to those for those reasons that you say - it’s like a shared familiarity. It resonates with people.
So there’s an element of bringing back some realness?
There’s something about the process of me choosing those particular images and then deciding to transform them, firstly by scale. Choosing to paint in oils on canvas gives them a kind of gravitas and a purpose and demands that you take them seriously in some way. I quite like that - it makes people stop and it makes people look and question and chat and think about the subject matter.
There’s a warmth to it. They’re relatable.
When I take them to an art fair, people will see them and come up to me and say ‘Oh, you must be northern, right?’ or ‘You must be from Ireland’. Nope. They just see what they want to see and they relate to it how they want to relate. And sometimes people want to hear all about the reality of those images and where I got them from, and what they mean to me, and I’m happy to chat away with that. But sometimes I can see people laying their own history and their own thoughts over the painting. And I don’t interfere with that.
Do people commission you to do their photos?
Yeah, it’s always been something I’ve done, often it was sort of like portraits. But since I’ve been doing this work, I’ve done tons of old Polaroid snaps, often of people who have passed away and all people have got left is this tiny little black-and-white snap of their nan and they want to make it something special and something to hang on their wall. It’s a lovely thing.
In many of your paintings, you go into super-minute detail of trying to capture a photograph, but then there’s some that are slightly more abstract, maybe in terms of blurring of the face or the light?
Yeah, that’s because that’s how the photo was. And sometimes it’s how it pans out. When you’re actually just doing the painting, you might go with something because it’s working. Sometimes if I do a really detailed-type painting, the next one I do might be looser, just to just mix it up. But mainly it’s because that is the image that has captured my attention.
It’s not always about the subject matter, sometimes it’s the light or the out-of-focus or the overexposed colour. Sometimes you can barely see anything, but you can sort of vaguely see some 70s lairy wallpaper - and that’s what captures me.
There’s a few that almost have a slightly sinister edge to them. One entitled Party like it’s 1971.
Is that by design, or something that just shows through, or would you disagree?
I could tell you that they’re not sinister, but I’m quite enjoying that you think they are - and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Once I’m done choosing the images, painting them and presenting them to the world, they’re none of my business anymore. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
How did you come up with this as an idea to do?
It slowly developed. There were a couple of elements that sort of came together. I guess I was going to say maybe it’s a bit of a time-of-life thing. A sort of reflection.
I’d lost a couple of members of my family and I wanted to paint them and they were very personal.
And then that took me down a sort of rabbit hole of looking at old Polaroids and reflecting on the topic of nostalgia. But my 18-year-old’s nostalgic for the 90s that he didn’t even live in. I think nostalgia is just an incredibly interesting subject.
It obviously struck a chord with other people…
I started dipping into my own photo collection and painting more and more. I started to think ‘How come I’m getting these strong reactions from people who are seeing these paintings?’. And so I started unpicking it after I started doing it. I think it’s nostalgia for a time gone by, but it’s also a remembering of something that is absent from now. It’s a comment on what is missing from now, I think, rather than just harping back to a particular time. That’s the reaction that I got from myself and that’s the reaction that I got from other people.
INFO: louiserieger.com
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