Petra Bianchi talks to artist Debbie Caruana Dingli about her latest

collection of pictures.

Debbie Caruana Dingli is showing 25 new paintings at an exhibition in aid of Caritas in May. Twenty years have passed since she first exhibited her pictures to the public in 1985, and her work has naturally moved on and changed considerably since then.

When she began painting as a young girl, her artistic talent was fuelled by her family history – her grandfather Robert and his brother Edward were both admired and successful painters, with Edward remembered especially for his accomplished portraits.

Since then, Debbie has built a strong reputation of her own for portraits, so far mainly in watercolour. She explains that at the moment she is working hard on developing her skills at portraits in oils, and she hopes to expand this side of her output in the future – this might be her next ‘phase’, as she describes it.

Over the last year or so, Debbie has begun teaching watercolour painting to adults. Many of her pupils always wished to take up painting but may have missed earlier possibilities to do so. Teaching art is a new and enjoyable experience for her, which has given her the opportunity to share and think about her own techniques in a fresh way.

One of the most individual aspects of Debbie’s art is her experimentation with humorous social satire, which is quite unusual on the Maltese art scene. One contemporary artist with whom she shares this interest is Andrew Diacono, who is showing several of his paintings and sculptures in the same exhibition at the Casino Maltese in May.

Debbie’s last solo exhibition at St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity in 2000 was called ‘Games People Play’, and consisted largely of humorous expositions of the falsity and pretences that she observed in the relationships between people. Her recent paintings are also satirical, but now her characters are often studied in isolation as individuals, rather than in terms of their relationships with others.

She explains that in this set of paintings she has focused mainly on female figures, and that one of her aims is to expose them. She wants to show what they are really feeling beneath the surface. The mood of the new paintings is generally darker than in her previous work, although a few pictures purposely take up the same themes as the more sombre works, and approach them in a light-hearted way.

In one picture, the body of a woman in a red, glaring landscape contains a second woman curled up in the dark inside her, which Debbie explains is the ‘real’ woman underneath. In another, this second woman appears again, this time alone and tied to strings like a puppet.

In another picture, a woman is climbing in or out of her ‘exterior’ layers, which look like somebody else’s body. Exploding emotions are represented by bodies shot out and whirling in empty space on beds. A lonely, unattractive bride walks hesitantly with drooping shoulders in a desolate landscape.

In the picture entitled ‘Hypocrite’, a false friend is encircled by green dancing demons which reveal her true inner self, which is insincere and malicious. A small, frightened person hides under a bed, with inner fears rising up as enormous faces in the dark.

In these paintings the body is presented as a shell, yet her characters cannot detach themselves from their physical nature, while they appear to be struggling to do so. Young, thin girls move or stand awkwardly, unsure of themselves. Faceless men with anguished body language make occasional passes at obese women.

Debbie tends to use comical, cartoonish figures when she is at her most serious. This playful approach softens the raw sentiments that lie beneath a number of the pictures. Those that are purely light-hearted at first seem to tone down the effect of the set as a whole, but in the end each picture must stand alone.

“What does it mean?” is a question which constantly pushes itself into the conversation when discussing Debbie’s pictures. They are so filled with narrative that each one comes across mainly as a story that needs to be interpreted and understood. The stories are perhaps their most dominant aspect.

Here she has shifted from watercolours to oils, with the idea that the bright surfaces and intense colours of oil paints are better suited to convey the strong emotions and enthusiasm present in the pictures.

Debbie says that she experiences painting as a way of exploring feelings and thoughts that can be difficult to confront or express elsewhere. In this new set of paintings, the connection between her inner self and her medium is particularly direct, more than ever before in her work.

The exhibition in aid of Caritas opens at the Casino Maltese in Valletta on 14 May. Once the exhibition closes, the works will move to the new and enterprising Gallery G at Villa Gourgion in Lija.

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