A Slower Conversation with Kent
Once home to a farm dairy, Lucy’s studio was built with practicality in mind, as opposed to having any focus on modern creature comforts. The windows are set higher than usual, presumably to maximise the wall space at working level, and its brick and stone structure has been left exposed. Despite its utilitarian design, it is a light and inviting room and its whitewashed walls create a bright space that encourages creativity. Outside of the studio, views across open fields to the South Downs demand your attention, so it is fortunate that they are hidden from Lucy when she is working as they would undoubtedly be a constant distraction to an artist who regards the beauty of nature as her foremost subject. Inside her whitewashed cocoon, Lucy is in her safe space, away from external distractions and the inevitable pressures of modern life. This is a place where art can take centre stage and Lucy is able to rekindle a relationship with her first love – painting.
Your process starts with sketches, or would you call it preliminary work? For me, they are finished paintings. They’re en plein air, painted outside, so that is about sitting and observing. It’s very important that I’m in the landscape, everything starts in reality. They’re not traditional water colours because they’re not done in traditional colours but they’re very classic compositions, they’re about the light moving and again, capturing the spirit of the place. You start with en plein air works and then you go through a development process in the studio? Yes, I come back to the studio, primarily to think more than anything else. My process at the moment follows a classic design process where you try to work out what’s important and you follow a path that takes you from figurative into abstract. It’s a way of working out what’s important from a line perspective, but also again, what conveys the spirit of the place and how I communicate that as minimally as possible. So the final abstraction captures the emotional essence of that time and place? That’s right, and that emotion is a genuine love of our landscape – looking at it with joy and positivity. There isn’t enough of that in our lives. It was interesting that the thing people responded to during Covid was primarily that positivity. The paintings are meant to uplift.
Can you talk about your colour selection. I use 7 colours, essentially the colours of the rainbow which are the colours of light, and in my view, are the basis of everything that we see. When you think about that from a scientific perspective, it’s interesting. It depends on your personal beliefs but I’m interested in colour theory and colour as a healer. There are chakras in yoga and those colours are the same – they’re all based on the colour of light. Will your work always consist of those 7 colours? That I don’t know. I can tell you that at the moment it does, but I can’t tell you if it will in 5 years. That’s the exciting thing about art. I don’t know what’s going to happen.
I use 7 colours, essentially the colours of the rainbow which are the colours of light, and in my view, are the basis of everything that we see.
Could you ever see yourself using black?! Well, I mean – I don’t think I will, but who knows? I think the other thing about using a restricted palette is it allows you to create other colours within the colours, which, again, I think is really interesting. A minimal colour palette also reduces the amount of thinking time, doesn’t it? It does, but for me it’s more about refinement, simplicity and purity more than anything else. It also allows freedom of expression because I’m not worrying about what colour I’m choosing. Although my paintings are about colour, they’re really about light, they’re about line, feeling and expression. Do you consciously select colours for certain areas of your work or is that choice based on composition? Do the colours in the picture we’re looking at represent light, shape, emotion…? All of those things. I like people to see what they want to see, but if people want to understand where it’s come from, I love to talk about it. What I have done during the abstraction process is think about the lines and the feelings at different times of the day. Remembering the initial paintings were produced from sunrise to sunset, the final piece is about 1 landscape during the course of a single day. So, you were there for the whole day? That’s right. Essentially what you’re seeing are the colours that I’ve selected to represent the times of the day – the form and light changing across the day and if you think about that, it makes sense that it’s balanced in the way that it is. You’ve got the sun rising and then the shadows and forms change as you go through the day.
Much of your mark making is very fluid and the paint is dense but there are a couple of areas where the paint is diluted, including one area which, looking at your en plein air paintings, looks to be a representation of the sun? Correct. Going back to the idea of capturing the spirit and energy of a place, what I’m trying to do is to capture movement. The thing that interests me the most is how you capture the movement that surrounds us as something that’s static – much like a photograph. The large scale means that I can capture that movement across the whole of the canvas. Clouds have a very different movement to light – they can stay static but at the same time they’re moving in and out because they’re gaseous, so the fluidity is capturing that sky and cloud movement. What you recognised as the sun, the fluidity of that represents the sun rising up over a period of time. I’m not trying to capture it in one moment. It’s trying to capture what it does over a period of time. Your colours are those you may expect a child to use and their purity on the bright white canvas give the paintings a sense of innocence – they are playful, open and inviting. I think the childlike aspect is about returning to a time before you were taught. It’s about painting with your soul and that’s why I have to get myself into a certain state when painting. There’s obviously no weight on your shoulders when your painting. No, you have to be completely and utterly free. That is a childlike state, before you’ve gone through education or any form of conditioning. I’m trying to paint from my soul, from my heart, so it is the truest expression of me. The colour helps with that because it is very emotive. The work I’m moving into is focusing on a single colour, even more simplified or minimised and then your expression is through the different tones of that 1 colour. I think that’s absolutely fascinating.
Could your paintings become so abstracted that they are just a solid colour in the future? I don’t think so because the white is really important. The absence of colour is as important as the colour. That makes sense. Is the childlike character of your colours a conscious decision to transport you back to a childlike state, or are they to convey innocent emotions? What I’m trying to explore is if you think they form part of a personal healing process? I don’t know if I’d have the answer to that, actually. I think there’s definitely a part of it in terms of it healing me, I do genuinely believe that. I’m going to answer it in a slightly different way, I think that the purest expression of my being or soul comes from that childlike state. It’s very difficult to explain but I try really hard, I hate artists not wanting to talk about their work. I think it’s really important that people find art accessible. I can only explain what it is that I personally do and if you asked me why a line was in a particular place, it is a response to me looking at something for a very long time, but the actual painting happens in a state of intuitiveness, no marks go on the canvas before I do anything and when the actual physical painting happens, that just sort of comes out and it’s exhausting.
When you describe your painting process being completed in one session, it sounds similar to a film director doing a one take shot. Is this a one take painting? Absolutely. Your canvases are big. Where do you work on them? On the floor at the moment but that may change. I paint on the floor because I feel most comfortable and I can get the flow that I want on the floor. And when you look at a blank canvas, do you feel any fear? The canvas doesn’t scare me at all. My studio is completely white – I’ve been in here about eighteen months and when I first moved in, it was beautiful. It’s still beautiful but in a different way. It was really important that I wasn’t scared to make a mess because you can’t have any fear when you’re moving paint at quite a speed. I’ve got beautiful whitewashed walls but they’ve now got paint on them. Your sofa’s got paint on it. I mean everything’s got paint on it – I can’t have anything that’s precious. At the moment I paint on un-stretched canvases but I am thinking about painting on boards. Part of the reason for the un-stretched canvas is it allows it to not feel like an object to me – it doesn’t become an object until it’s stretched, they always feel like they’re mine until that moment.
Your larger pieces are very expressive and obviously require a lot of physical movement to create. Could you describe the movement – is it one or a series of actions? It varies. It’s definitely not dancing in any way because I’m really crap at dancing. It involves the whole body, it has to because it sweeps. Even as I apply the paint directly to the canvas, that is a movement in itself and then there’s another movement to move the paint. It’s all happening in a very intuitive way. I suppose the thing for me is where am I standing, where is the paint going to move to? That’s probably the only thinking I do. You’ve got to think about where you’re standing in comparison to the brush or tool that you’re using, and where the paint is going to go. What tools do you use? It varies. There might be no tool, there might just be paint applied directly. There may be water applied, there may be brushes. I didn’t go to art school, so I’m not constrained by the rules of this does this and that does that. I do my own thing. There’s no rules. That’s a nice thing. I think there’s a lot of rules in art and I don’t think there should be. I talk to other artists and you’re constantly told you can’t do that and it’s like, well, why not?
Are any pieces ever abandoned or do you accept what you may initially consider to be a mistake? You can’t make a mistake – if something happens, you have to go with it but that comes back to the point that things have to be thought about carefully. It isn’t contrived in any way but it is controlled and thoughtful. I like to think of it as intelligent rather than anything else.
Could you ever see yourself working straight to canvas without the preliminary work? My painting, Here Comes the Sun, went straight from en plein air sketches to canvas in a single day. So, I’m wondering why you use the abstraction process at all? I may not do in future, it may just be that I’ve needed that from a confidence perspective. Now I have more time, I can explore different ways to work and that’s why I don’t want to predetermine what happens in the next 5 years, you don’t know and if your work isn’t changing and improving, then what’s the point?
Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood? Oh, God. Childhood is quite a big topic. Yes, it is a big topic isn’t it! Ok, let’s just say, what kind of pupil were you at school? Did you work hard, were you rebellious or… Probably a bit of both. Interesting question. I’ve always been cheeky, I’ve always had something to say. I was artistic and creative but I was also incredibly academic. So, you were cheeky but worked hard so you got away with it. Yeah, and I would always understand where the boundary was – I’d be naughty but I would also get A grades and I didn’t like being told off. I genuinely dislike confrontation so I would never do anything that would put me in that position. And before you were an artist you were an architect. What led to that career path? I always wanted to paint and when I reflect back, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Do you feel you’ve wasted time then? I’ll come back to that, if that’s okay. I was never discouraged from art but I was never encouraged. By who? The people around me, but my parents primarily. What did your parents do for a living? They were both teachers in special schools. Dad was a headmaster and Mum was a primary school teacher. Mum’s side of the family is very artistic. My aunt was an art teacher and potter, but I think there was this idea that it was better to have a ‘proper’ profession rather than be an artist. It was never talked about in that way but architecture was definitely encouraged as something that allowed you to be creative whilst having a ‘proper’ job. I wanted to do maths and art at A level but they were in the same streaming column so I couldn’t do both. Design requires both maths and art so it was bonkers and I ended up doing art A level at a local college. I did that in the evenings and because I wasn’t in the school system, I never got that sort of teaching.
At the end of my A levels, the examiner came up to me and asked which art school I was going to but that hadn’t occurred to me because I was going down a different route. At that point, I could have stayed at home and done a foundation course at the local college, but I was ready to leave. I’ve now had 25 years in architecture and going back to your previous question, do I feel it was wasted time? No I don’t, because a lot of my work stems from that time – the purity of the work, the minimalism, the white surface – a lot of that comes from architecture. The colour and movement is a reaction to the drawings and buildings, which are generally solid and black & white. A maturity came from those 25 years of understanding myself and the world around me in a different way to somebody that hadn’t gone through an architecture route. Architecture is an art form. You’re designing with light which is very similar to painting. I think I’ve made peace with it, I needed that part of my life but always knew I would come back.
What was the transition point? I will warn you, I sometimes cry when I tell this bit of the story. I’m more comfortable with it now but sometimes it happens. I had a fairly major operation about 5 years ago for a benign tumour on my thyroid which was the size of a tennis ball. My original plan was to retire early and to paint seriously again having concluded my corporate career, but the operation made me question why I was waiting another 10 years to do that. I was always very work focused but gradually over a 4 or 5 year period following the operation, painting started taking centre stage. Covid meant I was at home, no travelling into London, no getting up at 6 in the morning and home at 11 at night with a crazy job in a global organisation – it allowed me to spend more time doing what I really wanted to do. A horrible time in your life acted as a wake up call. Art became part of that journey but I’m wondering if it was also part of your healing process? I think it was. I did a lot of crying and that was about healing and getting back to who I really am and being comfortable with that. Not being arrogant, I was successful, I was really good at what I did but it never fulfilled my soul. You were an artist trapped inside a successful architect’s body and despite the grief it caused, Covid was a positive turning point for you? Yeah, it was a huge turning point. The other factor was that I hadn’t practiced architecture for 8 years, I’d moved from being an architect into development and construction which came with a different level of creativity, I think stepping away from being a creative consultant into a corporate organisation allowed me to be freer with the painting because I wasn’t using my creativity designing buildings anymore. I was employing architects to do that so my outlet could be something else. I needed to be in that different environment to allow this to happen.
I’m presuming your success has given you a certain amount of financial stability and you are therefore now in quite a privileged position where, for starters, you can afford canvases this big!! Yes, but that does still scare me. It’s best to just not talk about it! I’ve always painted big and the problem is, big is expensive. I needed the funds to be able to afford the size, the quality of the material and the medium or paint. One of the things when you paint this minimally and this expressively is that you see everything. But believe me, it absolutely still scares me.
I’ve always been cheeky. I’ve always had something to say.
You’re now very conscious about looking after your body as well as your mind. Is that a reaction to your illness or has that always been part of your life? No, it’s very much about looking after myself now, whether it’s yoga or eating well, all of those things. I have to be at my absolute tip top condition to be able to paint. Is that emotionally or physically? Both because it’s all interrelated and if I’m not at my best, I can’t produce my best work. Could you not produce good work if you weren’t in a good physical and emotional state? It comes back to the fact that I want to share joy, I don’t want to share negativity. For me, it’s about spreading happiness and joy and if I’m not feeling at my best, I won’t produce the work that I want to, so all of the other things that I do, having a non-toxic environment, in every sense of the word, allows me to be able to do that. Including time. You need to be able to say this is my time. Again, that is one of my transition points. When I stopped work, I naively thought that I would be in the studio from 9 to 6, like a job, but I quickly worked out that you can’t work like that. You’re conditioned when you’re in a corporate environment. You sit in meetings all day, you do your seven and a half stroke fifteen hour days and you’re knackered, you don’t have time to think about, or do, anything else. Art doesn’t work like that.
When I was working and painting, I would have to carve out time to be able to do it so it would become something that had to be done at a specific time. I think that the creative process we talked about earlier stemmed from a way of me structuring my time, I had to in order for it to work with my career. Since I’ve stopped work, I have produced some paintings that haven’t been inspired by nature, they are just pure expression and I think there will be more of that. In order to do that, the eating well, reading, researching, going to galleries, yoga, going for walks, all of that is part of the creative process. I spent the first 3 months feeling guilty about time but I’m past that now. I had a team of 150 people and they took quite a lot of looking after, whereas now it’s just me and I have no rules or structure. It is terrifying when that structure goes – from the age of 3 to 49, my life was structured. What I’m trying to do with the painting is get back to that pre-structure state, back to when you’re 3. You’ll love this…my screen saver on my phone is a photo of me aged 3 in a nightie saying, ‘I am 3’. That is what I’m trying to get back to!
Well, that brings us full circle, so I think we should stop there but there was one final question I wanted to ask. Before I set out, I looked up the definition of an artist – A person who draws or paints a picture, either as a profession or a hobby. I thought, that is wonderfully simple – is art as simple as it sounds? I think it’s a really interesting question and people could debate that sort of stuff for hours. Let me show you something, a book produced in memorandum of my neighbour who was a potter, Stephanie Wright. Her children put this together and it contains quotes that she’d written in sketchbooks or jotted down with photographs that she’d taken, I just think this what you’re trying to say, ‘life is simpler than you think’. I think art is probably simpler than you think, as life is, so we should just get on with it, start doing it, living it, oh, and buying it!
Lucy often paints while listening to music – she will select a particular track that is pertinent to the piece she is working on and will then play that on loop for the entirety of her session in the studio. We asked Lucy if she would share some of the tracks that she has previously painted to…
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