Felt Landscapes | The Paintings of Lucy Barlow

Landscape haunts Lucy Barlow’s paintings. It is there, forever hovering, forever teasing the viewer with hidden contours and ambiguous depths. Horizons drift, dimensions fall away. Perspectives blend, bleed, and bump, moving from one ambiguous plane to the next. In this continual play of foreground and background, we may recognize something of Cubism, or perhaps even more strongly, of Helen Frankenthaler’s lyricism. However, it would be a mistake to see Barlow’s work as proceeding necessarily from landscape—as taking representational space and running with it, deconstructing as it goes along. Her work does not abstract from landscape, rather, her expression can be said to take on the guise of landscape. In other words, her playing with perspective does not unravel our perceptions of the world, but locates and expresses emotion. In the end, those hazily-formed landscapes we find in her work—both near and far, both contained and oceanic, both intimate and unsolicitous—seem to offer up whole emotional geographies, vistas of felt experience.

In Island, Barlow gives us a limpid scene with a distinctly Mediterranean palette: conch-shell pinks mixing with Hockney-esque pools of blue; gradations of green fields leading up to dotted red foliage. (Matisse, here, as in much of Barlow’s work, would seem to be an important touchstone.) However, Barlow prevents such an idyll from becoming too blissfully naïve or utopian. What is dramatised for us in that distance would seem far more dynamic, far more real, than untroubled paradise. The view is complex, deeply emotive. We look out onto patchwork of bird’s-eye-views and shifting planes. Meanwhile, out of this spatial flux, comes a certain momentum, a buoyancy, a generous and joyous uplift.

This potential for upward movement can be sensed elsewhere in Barlow’s paintings. In MMT, for instance, we find a marked tendency towards the upper parts of the canvas. A brilliant rush of rugged incandescence comes to form an alpine mountain range. Indeed, the effect is not unlike those more directly spiritual forms of art in which transcendence is implied by the gradual rising of the drama. The viewer is compelled to behold, to bear witness.

Again, Barlow’s play of background and foreground is fundamentally important, in this respect. Distances are brought nearer while depths of field are given the intensity of magnified surfaces. This is especially discernible in paintings like Island and MMT, but spatial ambiguities are equally integral to darker, less obviously dimensional works such as 4,7,8. Along with that painting’s elevated, boat-like shapes—drifting in their lagoon of deep vernal green—the thinning and the thickening of the paint is itself made to suggest hidden depths. As in a night time forest, what at first seems flat and impenetrable becomes, on closer inspection, unfathomably deep.

Somewhere, there is footage of Leonard Bernstein lecturing an orchestra on the meaning of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. He asks his musicians to remember ‘lying on the ground, in spring or summer; you lie down, face down on the ground, and you want to kiss it. You watch the grass grow and you want it to just enfold you.’ And it is precisely this desire, it seems to me, that a painting like Barlow’s 4,7,8, embodies: the need to commune with the dark fecundity of the earth. To bring the natural world, the surrounding landscape nearer and draw it in like breath, reconnecting self to place. We might imagine, Alan Bates, at this point, rolling through the grass, naked, in the film version of Women in Love, and not be far off the mark. Barlow, too, is constantly making her landscapes felt, allowing perception alone to embrace them, to feel something of their textural reality. Throughout her painting, sight is allowed to flex its muscles and come into flesh-like communion with the seen. These mountains, this sky, these leaves, this body of water—all these vague landmarks—they defy the illusion of their distance by emoting freely and by taking on the intimacy of more immediate surfaces. The world, emotionally, moves that much closer to us.

In 4,7,8, for instance, we are again drawn upwards with the scene, this time towards an abundance of red spilling forth from the top of the canvas, as if the seam in a Barnett Newman work had been partially unzipped. The red comes through from behind, with a weightiness like wet fruit. Here, we confront a running theme in Barlow’s painting: the play between concealment and revelation. Her work constantly asks us to guess what is being hidden and what shown. What has been left unsaid and, moreover, what is beyond saying? With 4,7,8, Barlow regales in the erotic subtext of these questions. If we can say, on the one hand, that this spilling forth of bountiful red implies a spiritual revelation (of the Sacred Heart, for instance), then it also carries with it an equally erotic charge, a disrobing. In the dark, in the stillness of night, our desire for communion has—in this instance, at least—been requited. The expansiveness of emotion has been described topographically.

Lucy Barlow ultimately presents painting as an existential event, a summary of one’s being-in-the-moment. Helen Frankenthaler’s influence is again apparent in the way each work can be said to embody an interior place (albeit a place witnessed only vaguely and momentarily, through a mist of associations and playful ambiguities). That being said, Barlow, as we have seen, manages to make these self-contained and subjective realms remarkably spacious. Her paintings are informed by the personal, yet they breathe with an organic worldliness and depth. If what we confront in them is an internal dialogue in-process, then it is also an open dialogue. This is key, because it allows the work to invite us into its configuration—making us imaginative participants in its creation—without any showiness, overt textuality, or gestural violence. Their invitation is a largely silent one, a presumed one. The paintings simply wait for us (as any panorama might) to look on, not just attentively but feelingly.

David K. O’Hara, 2009

Lucy Barlow

Born in 1982, Kent, England.
Lives and works in Oxford, England.

Education

2003-2006 Oxford Brookes University, Fine Art BA Hons. First Class Degree.

2002 Byam Shaw at Central St Martins, Fine Art Ba Hons.

2001-2002 Oxford Brookes University, Art Foundation. BTEC Merit.

Exhibitions

2009
'Sarah Brown and Lucy Barlow', Oxford Town Hall.

2008
'Obsessions', Modern Art Oxford.

2006
Torbay Contemporary, Torbay.
Oxford Brookes Fine Art Degree Show

2005
‘London Artist’s Book Fair 2005’, Institute of Contemporary Art, London.
‘YoungArtsBiz’ Finalist, St Edwards School, Oxford

2004
‘Brookes Contemporary’, Modern Art Oxford

2002
Oxford Brookes Art Foundation Exhibition.