LEISE WILSONNEW PAINTINGS

LEISE WILSONNEW PAINTINGS

Satis House11 Elms Avenue

Ramsgate Kent CT11 9BW01843 588181 ⎥ info@updowngallery.co.uk

www.updowngallery.co.uk

7th March - 19th April 2015

LIESE WILSONHow often does time allow for sky gazing? Or how often do we think to do it, time permitting or not? How often do we contem-plate its complexity; its intangibility, its temporality?

Growing up in London, Leise Wilson was always drawn to open spaces and being outside, blue skies or otherwise. Regular visits to her family in Kent instilled in her a fascination for the unique light of the coast, developing an intuitive memory for fleeting colours. In her paintings, these moments of seductive observa-tion enliven the everyday vista with icy sapphire blue skies, peach bathed white cliffs and an aureolin blaze of wild fennel in bloom.

Wilson’s sweeping watercolours are often large; her sheer cliffs, rolling fields and snow-topped peaks are breathy and spacious, existing on a scale not typically associated with watercolour painting. This initial play with the physicality of the work is fur-ther explored through Wilson’s process - painting onto tissue

paper that is then pasted in nuanced, translucent layers upon her large supports. This maintains a life and vibrancy to the paint, Wilson states, but it also gives her time to meditate on her com-positions, drawing on her experiences and recollections. Despite often referring to specific locations in the titles, these are works from memory not from life or secondary sources. Wilson visits and revisits a site over days, weeks, even months; not only is her experience of the landscape very direct, it is also patient. In the studio, her assortment of remembered visual moments, physical sensations, and associations instinctively inform the emergence of the work, the versatility of the tissue paper allowing for a sus-tained connection with the space as it emerges, buoyant with harmonious complexity.

At times, Wilson’s obsession with light is elemental to the point of abstraction. 365 Days is a single work comprised of a painting of the sky through a single windowpane every day for a year. The

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resulting work is a painting installation that explores the unpredict-able natural rhythms of light that influence us each day, physically and emotionally, while going so often unnoticed. Again Wilson is playful with formal concerns, imbuing minimal abstraction with very personal moments of experience. While the implication such human experience is a strong motivator for her work, human pres-ence is conspicuously absent. Her unpeopled landscapes are free from human noise and distraction, free even of Archie. There is an unearthly stillness and quiet, more silent than our own experience of the landscape could be; so quiet, she says, that one could hear the snowfall. In striving for this, Wilson develops spaces that are more lyrical than literal. These are traces of space; effortless and at first familiar, yet as their uncanny quiescence questions the expec-tations of our gaze, they begin to transcend the pictorial, shifting from image, to a more ambiguous imagining. A sublime imagining perhaps.

The philosophy of the Sublime emboldened the once overlooked field of Landscape art with a renewed sense of purpose and rever-

ence at a time when the rationalization and mechanization of na-ture and human experience was starting to feel reductive. The Sub-lime brought back a little magic, a little mystery and spirit, infusing the simple ‘view’ with sense of narrative, awe and beauty. Wilson eliminates the rational, technological and populated, but far from simply trying to hide away from the modern world, her deep and persuasive spaces actively explore alternate ways of looking and being.

Wilson believes in beauty. Her landscapes are knowingly imbued with an aestheticism exploring sentiment, the sensory-emotional values of painting and of subject, and of the capability of the image to explore the metaphysical. Their sublime noiseless spaciousness engages with beauty as a great communicator, generous, a place of mutual exchange. But also as contemplation, transience, and the search for meaning, challenging the continuing tendency to take landscape art at face value.

Text by Simon Foxall

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Wallflowers II2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm

Botany Bay I2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm

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Towards Joss Bay III2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm

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Towards Ramsgate I2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm

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Wallflowers III2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm

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Stone Bay I2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm

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Seasalter I2015 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 200 x 153 cm

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The Yellowness of Rape I2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

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High Tide I2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

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Primrose Hill II2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

Wave I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

Primrose Hill I2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

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Dover Cliffs I2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

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Lying in Meadows II 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

The Yellowness of Rape II2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm

Glacial Pool I2015 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm

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From My Window There Is A Mountain III2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 14.7 x 18 cm

From My Window There Is A Mountain VI2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 14 x 19.5 cm

The Silence of Snow2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 99.5 x 99.7 cm

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LEISE WILSON

2015 New Paintings – UpDown Gallery, Kent2014 Black White & One Print portfolio - UpDown Gallery, Kent 2013 6 Landscapes - Turner Contemporary Cafe, Margate, Kent

SELECTED GROUP SHOWS

2013 UpDown Gallery, Ramsgate, Kent2012 ‘Kala’ The Gallery, Harbour Arm , Margate, Kent2012 The Pie Factory, Margate, Kent2011 ‘Kaipos’ The Gallery, Margate Harbour Arm, Kent2010 ‘Dark Nights, Bright Lights’, Marine Studios, Kent2009 Turner Contemporary, Margate - One of 8 artists selected to represent the South East2009 Turner Contemporary Open, Margate, Kent2007 Shortlisted for the Lynn Painter Stainer Award2007 Canterbury Arts Festival2006 NEAC, Mall Galleries, London2001 Sandwich Gallery, Kent2000 C21, Southbank, London1999 The National Open, Sussex1999 Royal Societies of British Artists, Mall Galleries, London1998 Chichester Open, Sussex1998 Imperial Cancer Research Art, Mall Galleries, London1998 Laing Open, London1998 RSBA Mall Galleries, London1997 RSBA Mall Galleries, London1997 Royal Society of Marine Artists Mall Galleries, London1996 Maidstone City Art Gallery, Kent1996 Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, Wales1995 Higgin Gallery, Malone House, Ireland1995 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London1994 Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, Wales1994 The South Bank Gallery, London

CollectionsLaing Collection

LEISE WILSONNEW PAINTINGS