From the 2011 Art Week Magazine - will post a pdf and photographs soon. It was so exciting picking them all up!!!
Lindsey Horne's large-scale painting is impossible to miss. Hanging just inside the Richardson building, her portrait of a boy with braces was almost imposing.
"I've kind of always just done art," she explains as we sit down. But it was only when she went on exchange to California that she started doing a lot of it. "It was there that I had the studio space and the time to get into it."
The incredibly large scale of her canvases comes from when she started stapling them to the wall because she "felt really claustrophobic within the small canvas", and is largely influenced by her admiration of "that duality of going up really close and seeing a texture or a pattern, then having that really zoomed-out effect as well." Surprisingly, they're not very hard for her to paint, taking two eight-hour sessions to get through. "I don't really paint up close, I get sore arms from my style which is big and fast and swipey. I like working on the whole thing at once, so I use lots of linseed oil to keep the paint runny. I like how I don't let myself have rules when I paint."
Influenced by Jenny Saville, Horne's exhibited portrait has a similarly striking beauty, but not quite the same element of grotesque. Rather, the work is only slightly disturbing insofar as it looks sickly; the colours of the boys' face unnatural and feverish, his eyes longing and emptying.
A huge contributor to Art Week, Lindsey also made a fascinating presentation for the Pecha Kucha night on personification and how faces can represent something purely because of people's super-sensitivity to them. "Faces can be a really powerful tool no matter what realm you're going into. I was talking about that and how if you don't see a face people act differently. I just like faces."
They said that when Lucien Freud died earlier this year, it was the death of painting. But thanks to the likes of Lindsey Horne, I beg to differ. In the contemporary art world where portraiture has been almost exclusively replaced by photography, it's refreshing to see a painter so inspired by faces yet not entrapped by classical representation.
"I've kind of always just done art," she explains as we sit down. But it was only when she went on exchange to California that she started doing a lot of it. "It was there that I had the studio space and the time to get into it."
The incredibly large scale of her canvases comes from when she started stapling them to the wall because she "felt really claustrophobic within the small canvas", and is largely influenced by her admiration of "that duality of going up really close and seeing a texture or a pattern, then having that really zoomed-out effect as well." Surprisingly, they're not very hard for her to paint, taking two eight-hour sessions to get through. "I don't really paint up close, I get sore arms from my style which is big and fast and swipey. I like working on the whole thing at once, so I use lots of linseed oil to keep the paint runny. I like how I don't let myself have rules when I paint."
Influenced by Jenny Saville, Horne's exhibited portrait has a similarly striking beauty, but not quite the same element of grotesque. Rather, the work is only slightly disturbing insofar as it looks sickly; the colours of the boys' face unnatural and feverish, his eyes longing and emptying.
A huge contributor to Art Week, Lindsey also made a fascinating presentation for the Pecha Kucha night on personification and how faces can represent something purely because of people's super-sensitivity to them. "Faces can be a really powerful tool no matter what realm you're going into. I was talking about that and how if you don't see a face people act differently. I just like faces."
They said that when Lucien Freud died earlier this year, it was the death of painting. But thanks to the likes of Lindsey Horne, I beg to differ. In the contemporary art world where portraiture has been almost exclusively replaced by photography, it's refreshing to see a painter so inspired by faces yet not entrapped by classical representation.
P.S. I found and changed an editorial faux-pas in this piece - particularly embarrassing as the writer AND editor!
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