Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
What you notice first is the trumpet, a bright silver diagonal cutting across the warm green room, its bell flaring toward the window light. A small child in a dark floral dress lifts it to her lips with both hands, cheeks working with the effort; beside her a man in a striped shirt, grey knit vest and patterned tie leans in, mouth open in a laugh, hands raised mid-clap to catch the note. The gesture is unmistakable and completely unguarded, the applause of someone watching a first attempt actually succeed, and the whole picture turns on the warmth passing between them.
Idun-Tawiah dresses the interior with a collector’s patience. Heavy floral curtains, a lampshade throwing a small pool of gold, a vintage BUSH radiogram set on a turned-leg wooden table, framed family photographs stepped along the wall and the sideboard behind. Every object has been chosen to sit a few decades back in time, the palette held to sage green and faded floral, and the styling never tips into set dressing because the two figures are so plainly at ease inside it. The room does not read as a stage; it reads as a home that someone remembers.
The tenderness here is specific rather than generic. It lives in the father’s open, applauding hands, in the child’s total concentration on an instrument nearly the length of her arm, in the way the framed photographs on the wall rhyme quietly with the scene being made in front of them. This is a portrait of transmission, of one generation handing music and undivided attention down to the next inside the fiction of the series, an elegy that chooses to picture a father present rather than absent. It earns its emotion the slow way, through detail and through affection held steady in the frame.