Lucy has been living, painting and exhibiting in Ireland for almost forty years since graduating from art college in 1982. She has an extensive body of work that is in many private and public collections. Several of Lucy’s paintings have been bought by the Office of Public Works, as part of Ireland’s permanent state art collection.
Lucy’s major influences were forged early on in her career, from the early Modernist painters working at the turn and into the twentieth century- in particular Bonnard and Matisse-to seeing the large paper works of Elizabeth Blackadder in the early eighties in Sheffield and The Great Japan exhibition held at the National Gallery in London in 1981, all have contributed and helped develop and refine Lucy’s very unique and personal painting language and style. Her subject matter has stayed consistent throughout her working life exploring still life, flower paintings and the female form as part of her interiors. She experiments with the decorative frontal plane and plays with the perspective of objects within that condensed spatial format. Colour has always been Lucy’s primary preoccupation and the desire and need to use strong and emotionally stimulating colours in a rich and tactile way.
‘My self-directed apprenticeship was long and hard, but so essential, as now I can truly say, that my style and the way I use oil paint, really reflects what I want to convey as a painter and express as an emotion. I set out to produce richly textured, well-constructed, timeless paintings, that are emotionally uplifting and have lots of complex observed and imagined component parts to them in particular paying homage to the beauty and impact of colour’.
Qualifications
B.A. (Hons) Degree in Painting and Printmaking (Sheffield) 1982
Diploma in the History of European Painting, Trinity College, Dublin, 1983