Oh, Georgina (2024)

Oh, Georgina (2024) is a self-portrait rendered from a childhood photograph, capturing the artist before identity, performance, or artistic intention existed. Through painterly realism and soft tonal restraint, Georgina M. Cox reflects on the unguarded joy of early life and the distance between the self that was and the self that observes.

⤷ This work is deeply personal to me. It began as a study of colour and light, but evolved into something far more introspective — a conversation with my earliest self. Painting from a childhood image meant revisiting a moment that felt both mine and not mine, an existence unshaped by reflection.

The palette leans toward warmth and memory: dusty rose, soft lavender, muted flesh tones. I wanted to capture the imperfect texture of old photographs and the fragility of nostalgia without idealising it. The expression is open, unposed, almost defiant in its simplicity — a small smile unaware of future expectations.

In many ways, Oh, Georgina is about reclaiming the subjectivity of the child within the artist. It’s an act of looking backwards with care rather than sentimentality, of acknowledging the innocence that once existed without trying to inhabit it again.

Unlike my mythic or conceptual works, this painting is stripped of metaphor. Its power lies in its honesty. The background fades into pale hues, almost dissolving, so that the figure becomes the sole source of warmth and presence. Every brushstroke is deliberate but tender, as though speaking to a version of myself I can only reach through paint.

This portrait became a quiet statement of continuity — that the artist, however transformed, still carries this version of herself somewhere within the work.