What type of artist is lisa milroy

I began to paint objects within settings, which expanded my understanding of still life to embrace landscape, architecture, portraiture and storytelling. Slow painting allowed me to spend weeks or months on a painting, building up a depiction gradually through layers of paint.

As each layer covered the layer beneath, it simultaneously added to and destroyed a bank of visual information, entwining loss and gain, known and unknown in material sensual form. If fast painting is allied to gesture and the flatness of the picture plane, slow painting, with its modulated layers of paint, creates pictorial depth and space.

In the s, my approach to painting through installation and performance introduced real time and space into the mix, and the presence of people and the female body. My process is also underpinned by pre art through my study and love of paintings by Velasquez, Goya and Manet.

You have described yourself as a still life painter. Can you talk a bit about the appeal of the inanimate object as subject? How has teaching in an art school influenced your practice? I appreciate exposure to diverse craft traditions and art histories through the global mix of students.

These images were superceded almost immediately by Milroy's series of sketchy comic-strip-style canvases, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e. Depicting geishas performing domestic tasks, they were far removed from the her previous work. Such a fluid approach to style suggests that Milroy's work is governed by her interest in technique and love of paint, yet she shied from calling herself an artist until very recently, saying it was a job description best confined to her passport.

Her decision to leave Canada was a compulsion; she says she was enticed by her love of art history, her Ukrainian roots and a desire to continue the travelling she had done as a child visiting extended family across Canada.

Her career took off relatively quickly after graduating from Goldsmiths in Her work was included in a show at the Serpentine in and bought by Saatchi not long afterwards, appearing in his Saatchi Gift to the Tate in In her new show she continues her explorations in several large works dotted with cheery plates, bowls and saucers.

These pieces also provide a primer in the kind of purposeful stylistic pick-and-choose which Milroy employs, and the subtle tensions she keeps balanced.

Regimentally set in blank monochromatic fields, her dish paintings echo Pop Art's preoccupation with both calculated repetition and the ubiquitous details of daily living, yet the objects are given conventional pictorial body through the simple application of shadow, while further inspection reveals wonderfully gestural brushwork in the most painterly of traditions.

Even the plates themselves, while signifying a type of repetitive mundanity, are decorated in their own unique style. The paintings are sly conflations of differing theoretical and mechanical approaches toward one subject, incorporating both a classical faith in objects and a post-modernist scepticism about the contexts in which they are usually framed.

While the plate paintings give the viewer a glimpse of Milroy's past, the other four groups of works - of flowers, rocks, crowd scenes and landscapes - point toward several interesting evolutions. The rocks are perhaps the most similar to the plates in subject and format, though one piece is made up of 24 individual square canvases, a plan which imposes the same kind of spatial order found in Milroy's earlier works.

Again, these are familiar things illustrated with a certain amount of precision but also with gestural grace, separated from the natural context in which one might expect to find objects painted in this manner, and instead set, like the dishes, with deep shadow in a featureless gray space. Government Art Collection.

Imperial Health Charity Art Collection. Jerwood Collection. National Trust, Antony. Royal Academy of Arts. Southampton City Art Gallery. Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. The Shire Hall Gallery. Walker Art Gallery. Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Link copied to clipboard! Subscribe to our newsletter New stories, newly added artworks and shop offers delivered straight to your inbox every week.

All new newsletter sign-ups are entered into our weekly prize draw terms and conditions apply.