125
Gerald Laing
The Dressing Table at the Rosarito Hotel – Self-Portrait with Galina III
signed, titled and dated 'The dressing table at the Rosarita Hotel' (Self portrait with Galina) Gerald Laing 1972' on the reverse
oil on canvas
63.5 x 76.5 cm (25 x 30 1/8 in.)
Painted in 1972.
Full-Cataloguing
'Not far South of Tiajuana, it is called the Rosarita Hotel; its large and fading, decorated in the Spanish style of the 1930’s, at which time it must have been a popular resort for the denizens of Hollywood.
Galina posed in silhouette in the window for some magnificent photographs which gave promise of her later huge contribution to the poetry of the Galina series sculptures. We walked on the beach, and I proposed to her, and she accepted. I photographed us in bed together, sitting up reflected in the great round mirror of the dressing table, and surrounded by the bric-a-brac and artefacts of the 1930s and 1950s which constitute a sort of still life in the enormous painting of the event which I made a few months later' (Gerald Laing, quoted in 'Gerald Laing: An Autobiography', unpublished manuscript, 2011. ch. 32, David Knight, Gerlad Laing Catalogue Raisonné, London, 2017, p. 180).
Galina posed in silhouette in the window for some magnificent photographs which gave promise of her later huge contribution to the poetry of the Galina series sculptures. We walked on the beach, and I proposed to her, and she accepted. I photographed us in bed together, sitting up reflected in the great round mirror of the dressing table, and surrounded by the bric-a-brac and artefacts of the 1930s and 1950s which constitute a sort of still life in the enormous painting of the event which I made a few months later' (Gerald Laing, quoted in 'Gerald Laing: An Autobiography', unpublished manuscript, 2011. ch. 32, David Knight, Gerlad Laing Catalogue Raisonné, London, 2017, p. 180).