DRAFT…..The Paintings of Savannah
Author: Brian Hawkeswood.
An Introduction
I reached down instinctively and caught her—just in time. I didn’t understand, at first, why she began to fall. I had placed her carefully in the seat, thinking she could sit there quietly for a moment. But I was new to this: new to parenting, new to understanding the delicate strength of a one-year-old child. I hadn’t yet learned that at that age, they can’t hold themselves steady in an aeroplane seat.
We were preparing for takeoff. Buckling in, ready for the long journey to Australia. QF1, London to Brisbane. That baby was my daughter, Savannah.
That moment—brief, barely noticed by the flight attendants—was the beginning of everything. Our life together. Our journey together. The first chapter in a series of adventures that would stretch across the next twelve years and many countries.
But this story is not about that particular journey. Not entirely.
This is the story of how Savannah became the subject of my paintings—not in the conventional sense of portraiture, but as a source of inspiration, of memory, of emotional truth. These oil paintings, created over the course of our travels, were never meant for exhibition. I called them my “found works”—not because they were lost, but because they were discovered. Found in the folds of everyday life. Found in moments of quiet observation. Found in her laughter, her gaze, the way she occupied space and time as she grew. They now belong to her.
They are portraits, yes—but more than that, they are meditations on growth, love, resilience, and the silent language between parent and child.
What follows is a selection of those paintings, each accompanied by a brief description and reflection. These are not museum pieces. They are memory pieces. The brushwork of a life lived together.
Savannah, Cell Phone
She was sixteen—on the cusp of something undefined, yet full of everything she had already become, in all the subtlety and disarray of adolescence. In this portrait, I sought not the clarity of a classical bust, but a fragment, a moment frozen in the liminal space between one world and another. Her face, slightly turned to the right, does not conform to the order we have been taught to expect. It is not symmetrical; it does not gaze into space, nor into some distant unknown. No, her eyes, those deep pools of concentration, are directed at something just beyond us, something passing quickly by—the fleeting, momentary sight only she can see.
This, perhaps, is where I diverged from convention, and borrowed from the great Impressionists—those painters who, with their defiance of balance, sought to capture the transient quality of existence. The asymmetry of the composition mirrors the disjointedness of time itself, the absence of the eye’s natural space to rest, because she is not looking into a void; she is looking into the world we cannot follow. The disconnection between viewer and subject reflects the same distance I feel, though she is no longer a child but not yet fully the adult she will be. We are on a train bound for Dresden, moving between places, between moments, between lives.
She is relaxed, settled into the soft embrace of the German train’s seat, yet her focus has shifted. Something outside the window has caught her attention—perhaps a distant blur of trees, or the play of light on the rail tracks—a glance that would have slipped unnoticed to anyone else, but not to her. The sunlight, warm and golden, bathes her face, a touch of radiance that makes the rich, thick application of oil paint shimmer. It is not a harsh light, nor a cool one, but the soft, comforting glow of a warmth that reflects a fleeting, yet undeniable sense of youth. The brushstrokes, deliberately visible in places, are not accidents of technique; they are part of the painting’s very soul, capturing both the texture of time and the texture of her.
Her cell phone, a modern marker of her existence, is tucked away at the bottom of the composition—small, almost forgotten, but essential nonetheless. It lies there, barely visible, a mere fragment of the scene, just as her attachment to the device is only one small part of who she is at this moment. Still, in its subtle presence, it becomes a kind of anchor to the world she belongs to, a world brimming with instant connections, possibilities, and distractions.
At this moment, she is nearing the end of her high school education at the international school in this foreign land, and while I may have thought I understood her as I painted—her thoughts, her dreams, her small, private rebellions—the truth is, she remains a mystery to me, as she is to every parent of a sixteen-year-old. The fears, hopes, and desires she carries are not mine to fully know. But this painting, in its simplicity, captures her lightness, her fleeting presence in this brief, infinite moment. It is a small testament to the beauty of her years, the beauty of now—a fleeting gift of time, not yet past but so soon to be.
In painting her, I was not just rendering the image of my daughter—I was capturing the radiance of her being, suspended between yesterday and tomorrow. I was honoured to hold her in this instant, to see her light in this brief moment before it, too, slipped away.
“Savannah Wooded Elephant “ Brian Hawkeswood. Private collection.
A Shared Gaze: Savannah and the Children of Mary Cassatt
There is a quiet kinship between Hawkeswood’s Savannah with Wooden Elephant, Sukhothai and the interior portraits of Mary Cassatt—particularly works such as Little Girl in a Blue Armchair or Young Girl Reading. Though separated by continents and centuries, both artists reveal a tender reverence for the inner lives of children, and both wield their brushes with a restraint that allows subtle psychological truths to emerge. In their hands, childhood becomes something deep and watchful, not merely decorative.
Savannah stands in the Thai daylight, not posed but immersed—an explorer of her own thoughts. She holds the small wooden elephant at arm’s length, presenting it to the air as if it were sacred. Her mouth is slightly open, caught in that brief, unselfconscious moment between breath and speech, as if the object had just whispered something only she could understand. There is a kind of suspended astonishment on her face—not a smile, not yet—but the wide-eyed absorption that comes when desire is fulfilled and the imagination awakened.
What passes through her thoughts is unknown, but joy is there—subtle, serious, full-bodied joy. This was the object she had pleaded for just moments earlier in the tourist stalls of Sukhothai. Now, with it in her hands, the world has narrowed to this single point of attention. She is utterly oblivious to the surroundings—the ancient ruins behind her, the ambient life of the street, even her father nearby, who watches and remembers. She has entered a private realm of admiration, wholly claimed by the miniature elephant in her grasp.
This deeply interior quality echoes Cassatt’s young girls, who are likewise absorbed in their own small acts of focus—holding a book, petting a dog, gazing into the middle distance. Cassatt did not sentimentalize childhood. She observed it. She captured the solemnity of a child’s attention, the gravitas of seemingly trivial moments. In Savannah’s gaze we find the same kind of profound solitude: the self forming quietly around a fascination, with no awareness of being watched.
Where Cassatt softened her forms with diffused, Impressionist light—letting upholstery dissolve into shadow, and a child’s figure blend gently with her chair—Hawkeswood achieves a similar effect in the backdrop of ancient stone. The ruins of Sukhothai are softened, blurred, rendered dreamlike. They echo the unknowable myths and histories of the land, while framing the clarity of the living child before them. The setting is not neutral; it speaks. It reminds us that the moment we’re witnessing—of a child lost in the thrill of possession and curiosity—is taking place within a much longer story.
Yet Hawkeswood’s palette and touch retain that painterly texture Cassatt favored: a love for surface, for the way paint itself can soften edges while still preserving the real. Savannah’s dress—a pale pink—echoes the hues of Cassatt’s interiors, wrapping the girl in tones that suggest both fragility and presence.
Together, these works from two different worlds remind us that children are not simply the promise of the future, but bearers of inner life in the present. They teach us how to see again—to marvel, to lose ourselves, to ask questions without needing immediate answers. In both Cassatt’s and Hawkeswood’s portraits, we are granted not just an image of a child, but an invitation to remember our own lost capacities for wonder.
In the heat of the Thai afternoon, after a morning spent weaving between the beaches, bays, and rainforests of Ko Chang, we paused. The humidity clung to the skin as always—an embrace that seemed inseparable from the island itself. We found a table beneath the wide canopy of a fig tree, its shade a welcome refuge from the unforgiving sun. Savannah, my constant companion as she sat behind me on the scooter, slid off with the grace of a child accustomed to small adventures. The air was filled with the gentle hum of the island, the chatter of nearby guests, and the persistent whisper of the sea.
It was then that her gaze caught the line of seashells hanging against the café wall, their white forms suspended on string like fragments of some forgotten treasure. Her curiosity was immediate, as always, and her small fingers reached for one of the shells. I said, almost absentmindedly, “You know you can hear the ocean in those, can’t you?”
Her eyes, wide with a child’s blend of wonder and trust, turned toward me with the seriousness that only a young child could afford. Without hesitation, she brought the shell to her ear, her face poised in a concentration beyond her seven years. “Do you hear it?” I asked, the question carrying more weight than I intended, as if we were unlocking some hidden truth.
“Yes,” she whispered.
There was something extraordinary in the way she sat, absorbed by the quiet murmur of the shell. It wasn’t just the sound she was listening for, but perhaps a mystery that went deeper—a question of how something so small could contain a whole world within it. The shell was more than a mere object; it was a vessel for her thoughts, a gateway into a larger story that only she could see.
I, on the other hand, was lost in the view that unfolded beyond her—a moment suspended in time, where a young mind was caught between the innocence of childhood and the beginnings of understanding. Savannah’s gaze drifted beyond the café window, through the dappling shade of the fig tree, past the red hibiscus flowers to the beach in the distance. Her face, with its furrowed brow and intent expression, seemed as if it were trying to hold all the complexities of the world—trying to grasp the elusive nature of what she was hearing and seeing. What did the shell tell her, I wondered? What was it she was beginning to perceive through its sounds, through its silence?
Her red T-shirt, vibrant and alive, added warmth to the scene. It was the pulse of color in a painting that was as much about stillness as it was about motion. And in that moment, as I sat watching her—her small body so absorbed in that simple act of listening, her mind unfolding with each passing second—I felt the entire weight of the scene settle around me. I saw the frame of the moment, the photograph in my mind already forming. It was a memory that would stay with me: the way the light filtered through the tree’s leaves, the way the hibiscus flowers swayed gently in the breeze, and above all, the quiet intimacy of her presence, lost in her own world.
Later, as I stood before the canvas, the brush in my hand became an extension of that moment. The paint, thick and textured, moved across the surface as I sought to capture that fleeting reverie. The brushstrokes are visible, distinct, as I pushed and pulled the oil paint, trying to evoke not just the scene but the feeling—the quiet, thoughtful peace of a child at the threshold of discovery. Savannah’s presence, her red shirt, the softening light, the shell—all became part of a larger narrative, one that stretched across the island, through the years, and into the quiet spaces of memory.
This painting is not merely a representation of what happened that afternoon on Ko Chang. It is the attempt to preserve the quiet intensity of that moment—the reverence, the stillness, and the unspoken bond between father and daughter, the shared experience that words cannot quite capture. It is the sound of the ocean, yes, but it is also the sound of a young child’s mind reaching out to grasp the world around her.
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