SIR RICHARD BRANSON reaches for the skies - Mayfair Times

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art
WHEN A SON OF FILM STARS
IS ABANDONED BY HIS FATHER,
THERE ARE BOUND TO BE
ISSUES IN HIS ART, SACHA
NEWLEY TELLS SOPHIE BISHOP
To say there is a mark of Freud in the works of Sacha Newley
would be an understatement. In style there is a debt to the
painter; in sentiment, more than a small nod to the psychologist.
Primarily a portrait artist, Sacha’s list of past commissions is
long and esteemed: Oliver Stone, Billy Wilder, Gore Vidal, Nigel
Hawthorne, Dominick Dunn, Steven Berkoff and Christopher
Reeve have all sat for him, plus, of course, the artist’s mother,
actress Joan Collins.
As is often the way, the portraits reveal as much about the
artist as the sitter. In Sacha’s case, they boil down to “a father
thing, because I’ve somewhat suffered from the absence of a
father in my life”.
Said father is Anthony Newley – the late English actor, singer
and songwriter who was married to Joan Collins from 1963 to
1970. He left when Sacha was just three.
“As wonderful as my father was,” says Sacha, “and he was a
great man and had a great impact on me, he wasn’t around
enough. I didn’t get my fill of my father’s energy. And so, in these
portraits of great men I’m seeking the father, I think. And that’s
why they’re strong and full of a kind of yearning.”
The portraits were mostly painted in the late 1990s. Since
then, Sacha, 43, has married society jeweller Angela Tassoni and
had a daughter of his own. And so the circle is complete: “I’m
through,” he says, “because I’m a father now and so, I think,
fathered myself.”
His most recent body of work, however, appears to suggest
otherwise. The exhibition at the Arts Club is Sacha’s first in the
UK since 2002 and focuses almost entirely on portraits of Newley.
These are hung alongside scenes from Sacha’s childhood as well
as works that explore the concepts of sin and celebrity,
philosophy and religion.
Most poignant, perhaps, is Farewell Prospero (pictured) – a
work painted from a series of photographs of Newley taken two
weeks before he died of cancer in April 1999. The painting shows
his father naked from the waist up, his arms held high to reveal a
large scar across his abdomen, his hand suspended as if in a
wave. It is, says Sacha, “a farewell image” and a moving tribute
to a father and “a great magician”.
Other paintings fuse the past and the present and are often
laced with more than a hint of nostalgia. Take Self Portrait With
Happy Family, which recreates a 1968 polaroid of the artist as a
child en famille with his parents and sister Tara. The family scene
appears idyllic yet six months after the photograph was taken,
Newley had packed up and left.
Family
values
LEFT: SACHA NEWLEY
PHOTO BY SKY SHARROCK
In the work, Sacha has painted his present-day self into the
background as an observer of the scene, in a bid, he says, to
forge a closeness with his father and to “find out who he was,
what he was thinking and what his feelings were”.
Somewhat naive in its blatancy, this uninhibited display of
emotion is, however, typical of the artist. For while Sacha
may be English in looks (Heathcliff meets Ralph Lauren) and
voice (soft, public school), he is certainly from the American
school of self-analysis.
As a backlash, one imagines, against the “inauthenticity” of
his showbusiness upbringing, Sacha has gone on to firmly
embrace the teachings of eastern philosophy, Buddhism and
meditation, “all of which are essentially attempts to get to the
bottom of yourself”.
His resentment of the world of celebrity is strong, going so far
as to brand it “as dangerous as Islamic fascism”, “a form of evil”
and later, “a spiritual pornography”.
Asked how his life has been affected by his parent’s fame, he
replies: “Badly, very badly.” he adds: “When I look back at my
childhood, in the way that showbusiness manipulated my parents
and changed them, made them desire certain things that were
unreal, then I can really locate the cause of my resentment.”
Discussing his father, Sacha is calm and appears
surprisingly detached. Yet it is clear there were fraught times
and the break-up of his parents’ marriage is placed firmly on
Newley’s shoulders.
“I think we would now call him a sex addict. He used sex to
LEFT: FAREWELL TO PROSPERO
COURTESY CATTO GALLERY LONDON
© SACHA NEWLEY
BELOW:THE ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT
THAT INSPIRED SELF PORTRAIT
WITH HAPPY FAMILY
medicate himself, just as people use alcohol to medicate
themselves. It was his narcotic. And it effectively took him away
from me. The Temptation of St Anthony is, I suppose, about
those temptations: the erotic temptations”.
The painting in question is a master of the grotesque. A tightly
wired circuit of naked women and “lewd bathroom humour stuff”,
the composition focuses on the figure of St. Anthony clawing
away from the viewer and the worldly temptations that surround
him. It’s a dark work and not exactly a pretty one but then that’s
what draws Sacha to the grotesque – “the disorder and
asymmetry and chaos”.
In style, Sacha’s work is passionate and dramatic with much
swirling of paint and pastels. Influence stems from Freud, Bacon
and Munch as well as the masters of portraiture: Sargent,
Velazquez and Rembrandt. And from his parents he has inherited
the acting gene, albeit a form of acting that is restricted to the
world within the canvas, “where it’s much safer and I don’t have
to deal with the audience”.
Asked how he would like his most recent works to be
seen, he describes them as part of “a long narrative.”He adds:
“I’d like my art to be a kind of visual story of one person who
hopefully came to some kind of true self-awareness and of
what life meant.”
Blessed Curse has been coordinated by the
Catto Gallery and runs from July 4-18 at The Arts Club,
40 Dover Street. T 020 7499 8581.
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