Thanks to Ceri for details of this upcoming exhibition at Quay Arts. Ed
With a move to the Isle of Wight in 2004, Traxler has since produced a prolific body of work in a variety of studios across the Island: aboard a houseboat in Bembridge, an old warehouse in Wootton Bridge, Quay Arts’ Jubilee Stores Studios in Newport, a Grand Design studio in Ryde to her present studio located on the south of the Island in a WWII Nissen Hut.
Join Lisa for an exploratory journey
Traxler’s vibrant paintings invite the viewer to engage with this exploratory journey through the decade and around the Island as the artist evolves her analytical approach to her painting practice.
This visual diary offers an Island narrative from the perspective of emotional response with pieces on loan from private collections to recent new works. For the artist, “a picture is the experienced, felt and intuited world – a connection with her own immediate surroundings and way of life.”
Modernist roots
Experiences of traveling extensively in her previous job in London as a fashion editor and costume designer have been a huge influence in her artwork and have made her more aware of the sense of where she is, hence her preoccupation with ‘place’. This body of work is unique in its subject matter deriving completely from her life on the Island.
“Traxler’s art is manifested in a number of ways. Her conventional studio practice of making works on canvas sits within the English tradition of lyrical abstract painting that has its roots in the modernism that was established in St. Ives in the 1940s.”
Jonathan Parsons, 2011
Echoing 1940s St. Ives palette
These bold, abstract works echo 1940s St. Ives palette; gull colour greys, warm burnt sienna and soft fluid blues. The mark making is loose and broad with thread marks leading the eye as they weave through the painting. The works displayed are brought together for the first time on loan from private collections across the Island and South region.
They investigate the process of making and enter a visual dialogue between works made in various environments, each of them underpinning a particular moment in the artist’s life. Written responses accompany the work to articulate this visual diary.
Pop-up studio
The exhibition will also include new paintings alongside a ‘studio setting’ transported from Traxler’s own studio to the gallery, revealing the working environment and making process behind her work. A small booklet will also accompany the exhibition with foreword by art critic, Peter Davies.
“The interpretation of memory is mine alone – irretrievable moments captured in the gesture of paint, an unraveling of a personal biography. A reflex action, an acknowledgment to place – almost as if subliminal. Unaware of where the mark making will take me, each response unique.
“As if in dream state the piece unfolds and only after the energy of mark making has taken place a realization occurs of memory, emotion and place. It is always this unknown that I am striving for, a spontaneity to proceed free from the entrapment of expectation.”
Lisa Traxler, 2012
From paint on canvas to vitreous enamel on steel
Her vibrant abstract paintings of acrylic and graphite on canvas paved the way for most recent works of vitreous enamel on steel. There is a tension between the nature of the materials used and their transformation into sculpture – paintings in space.
“Her most recent body of work consists of large-scale steel and vitreous enamel sculptures. These begin as delicate paper maquettes that are constructions of small clusters of individual sheets that are deftly cut and torn, coloured with paint and delineated with graphite. There is a lightness and poise to these objects that suggest they capture a fleeting, transitory moment of vision.
“The revelatory nature of her compositions in space embodies Traxler’s journey from the canvas to the factory and echoes the journey that she has embarked upon in her own life. She lives in an environment where anything seen in her surroundings can trigger an imagistic, compositional or painterly response.”
Jonathan Parsons, 2011
‘DECADE’ will run from Friday 3rd October until Saturday 22nd November 2014 in The West Gallery, Quay Arts, Isle of Wight. Galleries open: Monday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm. Entry to all galleries is free.
