Standards of Living (after Deposition by Rogier van der Weyden)
Artist Rick Morris Pushinsky
Accession number 2004-12
Trained in architecture and fine art, Rick Morris Pushinsky initially pursued a career as a painter and worked as a freelance picture editor until he first picked up a camera and found his true calling. He has gone on to become one of the most accomplished editorial portrait photographers in London.
Throughout his career he has sought, as with ‘Songs Of Innocence and Experience: A Study Guide’ and ‘Powerful Mantras’, a postcard series that combines encouraging self-help slogans with amusing everyday moments, to “make pictures of ordinary things transformed through photography and the imagination.” As he says, “Doesn’t hope have the habit of emerging from the unlikeliest of places?”
In earlier works where he combines painstakingly hand-painted Old Master images with domestic decoration and fittings, paintings have often been characterised by a single image, stripped of extraneous elements and giving way to the addition of domestic frill that strongly relates his images to the home. This irreverent mix of domestic decoration and Renaissance religious imagery aims to prompt questions of traditional British identity and house-proud Middle England.
In ‘Standards of Living (after Deposition by Rogier van der Weyden)’, the persecuted scapegoat of the Christ figure is lowered into a space containing William Morris wallpaper. This is wallpaper which was created by a socialist but which has come to symbolise the house-proud nature of Middle England. In this way, Pushinsky creates an image containing irony and disjunction where a symbol of stable home life is juxtaposed with its reverse, in the constantly moving itinerant who was stopped and killed as a scapegoat in order that society maintain the stability and fixity symbolised by Morris’ wallpaper.
