Thursday 5th February

Lisa Milroy

Anglo-Canadian painter. After a period as a student at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne (1977–8), she settled in London and studied art at St Martin’s School of Art (1978–9) and Goldsmiths College, University of London (1979–82). Her first solo exhibition, in 1984, was of small still-life paintings depicting common objects, either singly or in sets. These were technically remarkable works. Her subsequent series of paintings of objects in groups (rows, clusters, layers or grids) borrowed the language of hardware catalogues, shop display windows and formal arrangements in art and photography, while yet creating autonomous visual statements. Sometimes her arrangement of objects was influenced by their functional identity, so that, for example, stamps become islands for the eyes to travel between or wheels speed forward at an unstoppable visual pace. Later works continued to emphasise the arrangement of objects in relation to the picture plane, and in such works as Plates (1992; London, Nicola Jacobs and Tony Schlesinger priv. col.), in which four blocks of plates are presented in rows of four, six, three and five against a plain mid-grey background, an element of time was also introduced by giving the view of each block from a different height. Other works from the 1990s include landscapes, cityscapes and crowds. Crowd (1992; e.g. London, Nicola Jacobs and Tony Schlesinger priv. col.) demonstrates the artist’s continued interest in the technical aspect of the painting process, with strokes, dabs, dashes, dots, planes of colour and other painterly marks layering the surface.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lisa-milroy-2220

Comments:

*different height     Look into photographing form different heights

* strokes, dabs, dashes, dots    Consider effects that I could use on Images