Start Your Lucy Smallbone Collection; She Might Be Landscape Artist of the Year
Her second exhibition will run in tandem with the televised competition
This post may contain affiliate links. Learn more
British Artist Lucy Smallbone is one of the contestants in the new series of Landscape Artist of the Year, due to air on Sky Arts this Autumn 2018.
Contemporary London gallery Fiumano Clase hosts Lucy Smallbone’s second ever solo exhibition, Edgelands, from 25 October – 15 December.
Start Your Lucy Smallbone Collection; She Might Be Landscape Artist of the Year
Smallbone specialises in modern landscape painting and creates works that investigate the effect of memory in altering our perceptions of a place. She uses bold colour and abstract form to merge fictional and real spaces, creating vivid yet distorted images. The title for the exhibition, ‘Edgelands’, describes the transitional, liminal areas of space to be found on the boundaries between man-made and natural environments. Smallbone uses ‘this feeling of never truly having access to the landscape to reflect something that is felt in moments of the sublime in nature.’
Smallbone completed a masters at the Slade School of Fine Art where she won several awards for her work, including the Duveen Travel Prize in 2015. The travel prize enabled Smallbone to visit Chernobyl, Ukraine, which became a huge influence on her work.
There is something unusual about Smallbone’s paintings, which she describes as ‘beautiful with something not quite right about them’. Informed by her recent visit to Chernobyl, Smallbone’s works bridge an uneasy gap. Despite the lasting contamination of the area, scientists have been surprised by the dramatic revival of its wildlife. Abandoned man-made structures are juxtaposed with natural forms to create intriguing, albeit unsure, landscapes.
‘The red forest is the most radioactive area in the Zone and was physically burnt red by the contamination. In the work the fire like the radiation consumes and flattens the space making it hard for the viewer to access it, this was similar to my own experience of being in the red forest,’ says Smallbone.
Smallbone tends to work with oil paint on board; the rigidity of the board’s surface is less forgiving than canvas and allows for much more direct marks. Her paintings vary in size as Smallbone suggests there is ‘something interesting about painting something monumental on a small scale’.
Edgelands at Fiumano Clase will also coincide with Lucy Smallbone’s HSBC exhibition in Canary Wharf at the end of the year.
