Lucy
Lucy is an artist.
Her dad Peter died in 2022.
“Landscapes have always played a big part in my art practice. One of my first memories is my mum driving us up to Emley Moor and looking up and seeing this gorgeous view out of the window.
But for me, painting was always a love-hate relationship.
You block out your colours and you’re thinking ‘This is going to be amazing!’ Then in the next section, you think ‘I hate that.’ That’s the process going from layer to layer: you love it, you hate it.
There’s this tug of war between what you want to create - the idea in your head - and what ends up on the canvas.
I was living in Birmingham during the pandemic, locked down in my studio. There’s absolutely no landscape in the Midlands. My painting started to change into these pockets of land.
Dad wasn’t well - that was all I knew. But then I started getting phone calls: “Lucy when are you coming home?’
I didn’t understand how the emotion would hit me. I started overworking at my day job; trying to fill the time so I didn’t have to think about anything.
And when I tried to paint, it would bring up all this undealt-with emotion. I’d get really upset - it made it a really uncomfortable experience.
“When you haven’t created in a while, you get this real urge - you need to create just to feel normal.”
Honestly, I was just trying to survive. It was probably a full year before I picked up a brush again.
I was forced to make some new work for a show. They were the rules: the paintings had to be new. So I had to paint, even though I was filled with grief. It was so hard - a battle between me and the painting.
In the end. I made a small series of four paintings - that’s all I had to show for the entire year. My dad’s garden. That’s where he spent his time when he could. His roses. Artichokes he’d grown that’d been cut down.
Painting wasn’t bringing me any joy. It felt like - what’s the point? Art had always been my way of communicating, but this stopped me in my tracks.
When you haven’t created in a while, you get this real urge - you need to create just to feel normal.
Usually, I make canvases at the beginning of the year and I spend the next ten months painting. That’s my routine. I used to work in a picture framers, so I’m pretty hands-on.
By 2023, I’d started making canvases again. I spent a full six months playing with them - trying to stretch the canvas, seeing how it reacted. Making canvases with bits missing from them, twisting and tugging the fabric.
3D shapes started emerging. It happened almost by accident - this organic process. And as soon as I put a frame on one, I realised they had a life of their own. The shadows they cast almost tell their own stories.
I took an old painting and took it off its stretcher and rebuilt it. It was never quite right, but it’s become something new - something beautiful, even.
In my mind, I was calling them portals. It gave me comfort to think that maybe Dad could be there somewhere, in one of their realities.
Building these pieces, I got to process some of my feelings. It was coming out of me - not as a painting, but as something else.
A woman who bought one of them said that it really connected with her. It was really powerful to hear that. It’s not just something pretty to put up on her wall.
I’m taking some evaluation time now. But I think I want them to be more obnoxious and in your face and…sillier, perhaps?
I love painting big, and I feel these need to go bigger.
Maybe this is going beyond grief, maybe it’s more about everyday emotions.
Landscapes will always have me, but I think there’s something in this. And I don’t think I’m done talking about it.
This isn’t the end of something - it’s just the beginning.”