“Wallace Stevens, the American poet makes a clear link between poetry and painting when he says: ‘……… poetry and painting operate at the juncture between imagination and reality, and that: there is a universal poetry, of which literary poetry and painting are manifestations.’”
Contemporary British painter Lucie Winterson is widely admired for her ongoing series of lyrically atmospheric landscape paintings created from photographs, paint and sand. In these meditative paintings, one encounters the enigmatic language of humankind’s relationship with the natural world, expressed as a complex yet poetic imaginative space.
Winterson’s process begins with a giclée photograph. She covers her photograph of a natural scene with sand and applies paint with large brushes and mops, tilting the canvas to allow the paint to create its own patterning. The artist describes this captivating technique in language as poetic as her painting: “I watch and partially control the blooming of colour, sedimentations of sand and tide lines that dry at the edge of pools.”
Overall, Winterson’s work has an enigmatic quality, the effects of light and shadow reveal an atmospheric terrain infused with a sense of longing. In these paintings, we find ourselves engaged in questions about the profound connection humankind has with the earth: as a source for life and a place of metaphorical imagination, a landscape of mythos, emotion and beauty.
Rosa JH Berland
