GERALD LAING

Selected Citations and Comments

Members of the Senate and House of Representatives, their faces pixelled out for security reasons, responds enthusiastically to Blair’s neo-Churchillian promise that ‘We shall stand shoulder to shoulder with you in this conflict as we have in the past’ (Twenty minute ovation). The politicians are arranged in the same way as the adulatory figures in Jean-Paul Goude’s 1982 famous photograph of Grace Jones. Behind Blair stand Cheney and Tip O’Neil. They are very pleased with the way things are going. The poodle is jumping through the flaming hoop. Enraptured Blair, on his way back to the UK, has his equilibrium upset on receiving the news of the suicide of the UK’s Chief Weapons Inspector, Dr David Kelly, who had declared that he no further wish to live in the world which was being created around him.

Gerald Laing, 'Artist's Notes on War Paintings', unpublished manuscript, 2004