PORTRAITS OF THE TROUBLES
Colin Davidson’s haunting paintings, featuring the relatives of victims and survivors of the 30-year sectarian conflict, remind us of the appalling loss suffered by so many
MALE and female, young and old, Catholic and Protestant… the 18 people pictured in a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery are from very different backgrounds and walks of life. Sixteen are Northern Irish, one is from the Republic of Ireland and one is from Britain. But all 18 have one tragic thing in common: they lost a loved one or were injured in the Northern Ireland Troubles. “There is a universal sense of having come face to face with trauma, with unresolved loss,” says Colin Davidson, the artist who painted them. “Loss at somebody else’s hands. I have learnt that the grief and the bereavement process for this is not in any way the same as it is having lost someone through natural causes.”
Davidson, 55, has painted multiple official portraits during a long and successful career, including Bill Clinton, Brad Pitt, Ed Sheeran, Liam Neeson, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Mark Knopfler and Seamus Heaney. In 2016 he was invited to Buckingham Palace to paint the Queen. But this recent project, entitled Silent Testimony, is perhaps his most poignant.
Born in Belfast in the late 1960s, Davidson remembers the Troubles as the permanent backdrop to his youth. Although brought up Protestant, he chooses not to be labelled by any religion. Fortunate not to have lost a relative himself, he had friends whose parents or brothers were killed. The germ of the idea for the project was sown back in 1998, at the time of the Good Friday Agreement – the peace accord that finally ended the terrible sectarian conflict in which more than 3,500 civilians and soldiers were killed.
“There was virtually nothing in the agreement for those who had suffered loss,” he tells the Daily Express. “There was a hope in me, and probably in a lot of others, that this very difficult topic would at some stage be addressed.
“However, as the years went on, it became evident to me it wasn’t being addressed. Victims and survivors here are paying the price for everybody else’s peace.”
Davidson says that for the majority of Northern Irish people, the reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants encouraged by the
Good Friday Agreement was “the beginning of hope”. Conversely, for many others – those who were injured or whose loved ones were killed in the three decades of shootings and bomb attacks – it was “the end of hope”. He explains: “It meant that the person who was responsible for their loss – for the death of one of their loved ones – was now essentially free.” Davidson originally planned just a single portrait of someone whose relative had been killed. He mooted his idea with a Northern Irish charity for the bereaved, which put him in touch with other survivors. Before long, the single portrait had grown into a much larger project, with 18 different sitters.
He started painting in 2014 and completed all the portraits – each one the same size, 50 x 46ins – a year later. Some of his subjects he painted in his studio in Bangor, others in
‘A mother’s grief at the loss of her son is universal. That is the legacy of all conflict’
their own homes. The collection has already been displayed in Northern Ireland and the United States.
“I wanted the balance to be watertight,” he says of his decision to include bereaved and injured people of all ages and from both sides of the sectarian divide. “If somebody who had suffered loss through the Troubles was going to come and see the exhibition, I wanted them to identify with at least one of the paintings; one of the stories.”
Indeed, the loved ones of the relatives who sat for David were killed by both republican and loyalist terrorists, as well as police and British army personnel.
“We weren’t looking at Protestant loss or Catholic loss,” he explains. “The idea was always that we were looking at human loss.A mother’s grief and trauma at the loss of a son is universal. That’s the legacy of all conflict, full stop.Whenever the politicians start to sit down and talk, this is what is left behind.”
When he painted the Queen’s portrait in 2016, it occurred to him that he might even have included the Monarch in his art project as she had lost her cousin, Lord Mountbatten, in the Troubles when he was killed by an IRA bomb in 1979.
Davidson realises visitors to his exhibition might feel they are encroaching on the privacy of the subjects he has painted. “I think the power of Silent Testimony comes from
the fact we are observers,” he says. “When we see the 18 works hung in a gallery, we as viewers are intruding on their private lives. None of the sitters is looking at us.They are unaware of us being in the room. They are on their own. They are thinking their own thoughts.” Ultimately, Davidson wants gallery visitors to acknowledge the grief and trauma that is suffered by those who are bereaved or injured. But he stresses how his message is not confined to the conflict in Northern Ireland.
“This is the legacy of all conflict,” he adds. “These are faces from my part of the world but they could so easily be from any part of the world.”
●●Silent Testimony runs at The National Portrait Gallery until February 23, 2025