mo and kev.
If you’re in London this summer stop by the National Portrait Gallery’s BP Portrait Award Exhibition and see “Mo and Kev” by artist Chris Holt.
I’ve mentioned Chris’s artistic talents before and you’ll see from his bio on the National Portrait Gallery’s website that he’s also a BAFTA nominated director, writer, and producer. So you know right from the get-go he’s a bit of an underachiever.
The first time I saw one of his portraits was in his parents’ garage. I was helping my not-yet-husband look for a pair of roller skates. And sitting in a corner….“Some stuff Chris left when he moved…I think he did that one in school.” I don’t know who it was, or what it was meant to be to Chris. But I know what it was to me. Preacher Granville Muncey, laying on hands and baptizing down in the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River.
The resemblance really was spooky and put me to wondering if Chris was with that group of English anthropologists who came to West Virginia in the eighties to watch the Pentecostals and write text books about them – because the man in the painting didn’t just look like Granville, he was Granville. But Brother Granville never got out of the mountains…so how did he get into Chris’s head?
It took a while for me to realize that not everyone grew up with the Appalachians shielding them from the rest of everyone else and it was entirely possible Chris could know about things like faith healers and charismatics when I didn’t know about things like Ikea and Father Ted. So I got over the spooky feeling. But just barely.
