Peter Drake – Artist Statement

Life Sized Lead Soldiers

This new body of work is based on a collection of lead toy soldiers that my father assembled over the course of his life and that I inherited.

My first instinct is to look closer. I take macro photographs of the figures with raking light to heighten their effect and to exaggerate the distortions in the figures. I then use these photographs as a starting point for this series of paintings that are all larger than life. The scale is important to me because I want to reverse the roles of viewer and subject and have the toys loom over us. A toy Buckingham Palace guard can tower over the viewer like an equestrian sculpture. The backgrounds vary from suggestions of landscapes to more familiar still-life shelf settings. They can appear almost real and at other times more in keeping with the sculpture as still-life tradition.

The most exciting aspect of the blow-ups is the ways in which the figures became distorted by scale. Hands and feet appear to have been mangled and the pockmarks of missing paint looks like shrapnel wounds. Faces that seem acceptable as miniatures become grotesques when enlarged, swords become chain saws and rifles become candy canes. What is serious can appear absurd and the innocent can become not so innocent. A riflemen teetering on its wobbly stand becomes a metaphor for the instability of colonialist thinking and the entire project takes on the feeling of some layered déjà vu. It’s remarkable to think that so much meaning can be embedded in a child’s toy.

11/07