LEISE WILSON NEW PAINTINGS
LEISE WILSON
NEW PAINTINGS 7th March - 19th April 2015
Satis House 11 Elms Avenue Ramsgate Kent CT11 9BW 01843 588181 ⎼ info@updowngallery.co.uk www.updowngallery.co.uk
LIESE WILSON How often does time allow for sky gazing? Or how often do we think to do it, time permitting or not? How often do we contemplate 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 observation 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 further 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 compositions, 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 sustained 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 unpredictable 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 presence 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 expectations 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 nature and human experience was starting to feel reductive. The Sublime 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 II 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm
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Botany Bay I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm
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Towards Joss Bay III 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm
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Towards Ramsgate I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm
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Wallflowers III 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm
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Stone Bay I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm
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Seasalter I 2015 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 200 x 153 cm
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The Yellowness of Rape I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm
High Tide I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm
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Primrose Hill II 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm
Wave I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm
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Primrose Hill I 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm
Dover Cliffs I 2014 ⎥ 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 II 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 28 x 37 cm
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Glacial Pool I 2015 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 89.8 x 122 cm
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From My Window There Is A Mountain III 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 14.7 x 18 cm
From My Window There Is A Mountain VI 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on paper ⎥ 14 x 19.5 cm
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The Silence of Snow 2014 ⎥ Watercolour on board ⎥ 99.5 x 99.7 cm
LEISE WILSON 2015 2014 2013
New Paintings – UpDown Gallery, Kent Black White & One Print portfolio - UpDown Gallery, Kent 6 Landscapes - Turner Contemporary Cafe, Margate, Kent
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS 2013 2012 2012 2011 2010 2009 2009 2007 2007 2006 2001 2000 1999 1999 1998 1998 1998 1998 1997 1997 1996 1996 1995 1995 1994 1994
UpDown Gallery, Ramsgate, Kent ‘Kala’ The Gallery, Harbour Arm , Margate, Kent The Pie Factory, Margate, Kent ‘Kaipos’ The Gallery, Margate Harbour Arm, Kent ‘Dark Nights, Bright Lights’, Marine Studios, Kent Turner Contemporary, Margate - One of 8 artists selected to represent the South East Turner Contemporary Open, Margate, Kent Shortlisted for the Lynn Painter Stainer Award Canterbury Arts Festival NEAC, Mall Galleries, London Sandwich Gallery, Kent C21, Southbank, London The National Open, Sussex Royal Societies of British Artists, Mall Galleries, London Chichester Open, Sussex Imperial Cancer Research Art, Mall Galleries, London Laing Open, London RSBA Mall Galleries, London RSBA Mall Galleries, London Royal Society of Marine Artists Mall Galleries, London Maidstone City Art Gallery, Kent Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, Wales Higgin Gallery, Malone House, Ireland Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, Wales The South Bank Gallery, London
Collections Laing Collection