Artistic License: Lucy Doyle - The Gloss Magazine

Artistic License: Lucy Doyle

Based in Co Wicklow, the contemporary Irish artist’s new collection of paintings, completed during the last few lockdowns, is a feelgood celebration of colour and the natural world …

Is there is theme running through your new collection of paintings?

I started work on “Seasons” in the summer of last year. This is an ongoing collection of work that I will continue adding to as we head on into summer 2021. I paint the world around me finding a wealth of subject matter in the immediate landscape, gardenscape, pets, family and interiors that I live with. The seasons are a way of defining the world, like staging posts that we superimpose onto the continuum with its annual changes of day length, night and day, moon cycles and all the myriad nuances that make up the natural cycle of earth and its moon as it orbits the sun. During the year or so of lockdown the connection with the natural world has never felt more important and significant as we are all spending so much time in one place, so it seemed a positive and life empowering title for my new work.

Clearly your garden has been a source and inspiration too as has the changing of the season?

Yes, I adore painting flowers from my garden and every year I plant out more tulips bulbs and dahlia tubers to add to my flower beds, then watch them grow and bloom, waiting to gather them in to my studio to paint. I change my palette to match the mood I am in as I respond to the ever changing colours and weather in my garden. My new painting “Ode to Spring” is one such painting, where the excitement of seeing swathes of loud, all singing and dancing daffodils, triumphant against the blacks and plums of the over wintered soil, was just so impelling that I had to try to capture all that in paint.

The scale of some of the works is much bigger than before-was that deliberate?

Yes, “Seasons” is the one big 6ft x 6ft painting. It is massive and took me months to resolve before I could say it was finished. I deliberately started this at the beginning of last autumn’s lockdown. It was to counteract the depressive negativism that I felt as the inevitable lockdown was approaching. I had to grow wings and fight that sadness and the feeling of impending chaos that so many people were trying to cope with, in my own way. I had to do something to dispel the darkness, so I embarked on this huge “Seasons” painting full of life, flowers and colour that represents what it is to be alive on this amazing planet of ours. I deliberately set out to daily share and post as much colour and positivity on my Instagram feed, just to help anyone out there that might be needing some colour therapy.

Now that your exhibition has come together- do you plan to take a break or are you always painting?

I am still working on “Seasons” as a collection, and have a few more ideas before I feel I would like to move on to another series of work. But I am always painting and because I paint what I feel and my reaction to people, place and the subject matter around me, then I never really stop thinking, planning and producing paintings. It is my life, painting is me.

Need to know: Lucy Doyle’s new collection is available from The Doorway Gallery, 4 South Frederick Street, Dublin 2 and launches tomorrow April 29 until May 5. To hear Lucy speaking about this collection visit www.thedoorwaygallery.com.

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