Louise Lawton
Louise
Lawton was born in Guernsey in the Channel Islands in 1979. She studied Art Foundation
at Middlesex University and went on to graduate from Wimbledon School of Art
with a BA Hons. in painting in 2001. As part of her degree Lawton studied at
the school of fine art in Carrara, Italy. She later based her studio in Tuscany
where she lived and worked for over four years. She currently resides between
Guernsey and Portugal.
Having worked for a number of London art galleries since her graduation, she has exhibited internationally in places such as London, New York, Chicago and Frankfurt. She is renowned for her stark monochrome paintings of figures and crowd formations. The paintings are made on boards with a beautifully prepared gesso ground and then drawn onto using compressed charcoal. In her earlier work the emphasis was on representing the human form with as few lines as possible before reaching abstraction, which she did with just a few marks. Now the paintings are obsessively detailed and firmly occupy the figurative arena. This detail encourages the viewer to focus on the figures, which are like characters that all have their own story. However, Lawton’s emphasis has always been as much on the figures as on the space in which they occupy. The artist plays with space to create tension and uncertainty. There is a sense of silence amongst the crowds that in large are solitary. Absorbed by an abundance of white space they are denied any identity with their environment. There is a theatricality about the work that reminds one of Beckett, the overriding sense of waiting, of tension created by silences, contradicted by endless repetitive movement of crowds, ultimately going nowhere.
Her work has broadened to include whole cityscapes of places such as London and New York. On occasions she has also turned the viewpoint on its head and the audience is forced to look at the city and figures from the ground up wards or even through a letterbox type window. Taking months to create, these paintings are painstakingly drawn from multiple photographs of the particular city. Lawton cuts and pastes the photos by hand to create views much wider than anything a normal camera lens can capture. The lines of perspective are woven together to create a composition of a view that is believable, yet has a certain tension. Unlike Lawton’s figure pieces, in these compositions there is a pervading lack of space. There are areas of densely drawn charcoal made up of a multitude of lines, defining building after building. These areas are interrupted by small glimpses of open space dappled by sunlight, which somehow only succeed in drawing more attention to the density of these metropolises. The nature of the materials that Lawton uses draws attention to the micro, macro scale of the city, which is reminiscent of Andreas Gursky’s photographs. A tiny mark of compressed charcoal may represent a window of a building that is host to thousands of employees. A tiny dot represents a person, that although now in the context of an environment has no visible detail in the form of appearance or possessions that identify him or her from all the other dots within the city’s landscape. As with the figure work, there is a philosophical objectivity that this birds-eye view cannot escape – a kind of stillness that despite the busy bustling subject matter, makes the work peaceful and quietly interesting.
Having worked for a number of London art galleries since her graduation, she has exhibited internationally in places such as London, New York, Chicago and Frankfurt. She is renowned for her stark monochrome paintings of figures and crowd formations. The paintings are made on boards with a beautifully prepared gesso ground and then drawn onto using compressed charcoal. In her earlier work the emphasis was on representing the human form with as few lines as possible before reaching abstraction, which she did with just a few marks. Now the paintings are obsessively detailed and firmly occupy the figurative arena. This detail encourages the viewer to focus on the figures, which are like characters that all have their own story. However, Lawton’s emphasis has always been as much on the figures as on the space in which they occupy. The artist plays with space to create tension and uncertainty. There is a sense of silence amongst the crowds that in large are solitary. Absorbed by an abundance of white space they are denied any identity with their environment. There is a theatricality about the work that reminds one of Beckett, the overriding sense of waiting, of tension created by silences, contradicted by endless repetitive movement of crowds, ultimately going nowhere.
Her work has broadened to include whole cityscapes of places such as London and New York. On occasions she has also turned the viewpoint on its head and the audience is forced to look at the city and figures from the ground up wards or even through a letterbox type window. Taking months to create, these paintings are painstakingly drawn from multiple photographs of the particular city. Lawton cuts and pastes the photos by hand to create views much wider than anything a normal camera lens can capture. The lines of perspective are woven together to create a composition of a view that is believable, yet has a certain tension. Unlike Lawton’s figure pieces, in these compositions there is a pervading lack of space. There are areas of densely drawn charcoal made up of a multitude of lines, defining building after building. These areas are interrupted by small glimpses of open space dappled by sunlight, which somehow only succeed in drawing more attention to the density of these metropolises. The nature of the materials that Lawton uses draws attention to the micro, macro scale of the city, which is reminiscent of Andreas Gursky’s photographs. A tiny mark of compressed charcoal may represent a window of a building that is host to thousands of employees. A tiny dot represents a person, that although now in the context of an environment has no visible detail in the form of appearance or possessions that identify him or her from all the other dots within the city’s landscape. As with the figure work, there is a philosophical objectivity that this birds-eye view cannot escape – a kind of stillness that despite the busy bustling subject matter, makes the work peaceful and quietly interesting.
