ARTIST FEATURE - LUCY PASS

ARTIST | FEATURE

LUCY PASS

This months featured artist is Lucy Pass, a contemporary figurative painter currently living and working in Cheltenham. Through her mix of abstraction and representation, she explores inner dialogues, emotion and the human condition, creating starkly beautiful not-quite portraits of human experience and interaction with a confusing world.

Psychologically curious and thought-provoking, Lucy's work explores her own ideas whilst prompting (forcing?) you, the viewer, to determine your own. Using the figure to represent feelings or emotions or senses, they define these aspects of human life rather than portray a singular person. Deeply tense yet surprisingly languid, Lucy's paintings sometimes evoke a sense of unease and at other times, deep serenity.

Her paintings portray purposeful line, interacting with soft skin; eyes repeat or lips blur, fingers move before you on the canvas as the arms and heads they're attached to vanish, leaving you to wonder if they are there at all, or how much of it you're imagining. Are we in your head or the artists?

Using a reduced colour palette of delicious fleshiness on white or black, with recurring motifs of spots or glitches, Lucy balances delicate or exaggerated pinks with the yellow and red interruptions. Her works feel bright, Tutti-frutti, playful, in the way you play in a post-apocalyptic world, because what else is there to do but skip through the blunt landscape.

In Lucy's works, no space is negative, nothing is background. The neutral spaces have layer and texture rendered with the same care as the skins to create a sense of wholeness, of neither the figure nor its atmosphere being able to exist without the other. Light plays a subtle part. Not at first noticeable, but it dances off skin, reflecting in the abandoned space as features fall away to abstraction.

You can view Lucy's latest pieces over on her portfolio, buy works directly from her site, and find her work in real life at Sixteen Gallery in Print's Not Dead in December and our members' collective exhibition in January!

VIEW LUCY'S PORTFOLIO