Days are where we live - Ken Elias

Ken Elias, ‘Days are where we Live’, (1968) Acylic on canvas, From the USW Artworks Museum Collection

In the Autumn of 1968, I was a third year Fine Art student at Newport College of Art, when I watched a black and white television dramatisation of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. The poem followed several newly-wed couples, as they shared a train journey from Hull in the North of England to their honeymoon destinations in the City of London. Adopting the role of narrator, Larkin, who shared this ritual journey, commented upon the similar appearance and behaviour of the many newly-wed couples that boarded the train, and the similar, dramatic family happenings that they left behind on each station platform. So similar were their lives, so the same were their hopes and goals in life.

For me, the poem and the television programme held a sense of foreboding that hinted at the unspoken and unwritten rules of our adult lives. Conventional aims and goals were the norm, and any difference was suspect and questionable. This experience led me to paint four large paintings and of the four ‘Days are where we live’ is the only painting to have survived the last half of a century. The painting represents an image of perfection, a dream home, an Estate Agents delight, that will satisfy all your needs, and where you will live happily forever after. But in reality it is an illusion, a false image, with a cut-out front door, and white tabbed sides that hold the building erect. It represents an untruth, a misleading promise to the viewer and prospective ‘buyer’.

 The title of the 1968 painting, ‘Days are where we Live’ is not taken from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ poem, but from another shorter poem that is titled ‘Days’ and is included in the same ‘Whitsun Weddings’ collection.

 

'Re-visiting days are where we live' by Ken Elias (2021)

 

'Exercising Expectations' by Ken Elias (2021)

"Surprisingly, during the Covid19 crisis I have returned again to the theme of of this student painting, and made two new, smaller paintings.’Revisiting Days are where we Live’ depicts the ‘tabbed’ images of individual characters spending their days busy in cut-out sections of their ideal homes and gardens, while a larger, more authoritative figure is pieced together to dominate the left of the painting as a symbolic example of what is expected and sought of ourselves in our aim to achieve and live in conventional acceptance.

In ‘Exercising Expectations’ I have taken the remains of the folded brown paper covers that as a child I used to cover my school exercise books, to provide a map like base layer of the painting. Sharp and purposeful, the folds still hold a certainty in the many directions one may take through life. A childhood photograph of myself diverts my gaze from the acceptable construction of a male image, while repeated uniform images of stereotypical fathers and sons drift across the surface of the painting like drifting snow."

Ken Elias
17.10.2021