My Father as a Force of Nature in the Afterlife,2024-25)

That leads us naturally to Ballard’s equally abstract portrait of her father. ‘My Father as a Force of Nature’ is the smallest of the six making up ‘Where Have They Gone?’, but the biggest in energy. Ballard tried to represent him by depicting associated items, in particular a silver palm tree that stood in his study, but found that unsatisfactory. Then a ‘spontaneous whoosh’ of white gouache on the black ground suddenly caught what he was to her: ‘a force of nature strong enough to endure beyond this life’. And it is easy to appreciate that, as he was the widely acclaimed and posthumously influential writer J.G. Ballard (1930-2009), author of 16 novels along with much else.
Text by Paul Carey-Kent