Lucy Perry
Lucy Perry is a British painter-printmaker with a studio in the heart of East Anglia. Her extensive and lively body of work explores paint, pattern and print. In both painting and printmaking, her primary concerns are colour mixing and mark making.
Her intuitive responses are made en plein air, in the landscape and in the garden, and are then developed in the studio. Where she cannot work on site, she uses collaged and digitally manipulated photographs, or memory, to reach the essence of a space, dropping detail in favour of the shapes and colours that carry a connection to it. Layering is central to how the work is built. Her paintings are mainly in acrylic, with water-based pastels and pencils used to scribe gestural details and motifs, on triple-gessoed ply panels or on canvas. The collaged sketches she makes outdoors feed both the paintings and the prints.
Her printmaking centres on the cyanotype and screen printing processes, which she uses to record natural forms and handmade marks. She hand-coats and hand-prints her own photographs onto watercolour paper, and develops other cyanotypes further with screen printing, acrylic, bronze pigment and Dutch gold leaf, on paper and on canvas. She has also carried the processes onto fabric, making three-dimensional vase forms after the flower pyramids of seventeenth-century Delft.
Born at Belchamp Walter in Essex, Perry read History of Art at the University of Sussex and took a PGCE in Art at Cambridge. She has worked as an art educator since 1995 and was artist in residence at Little Hall, Lavenham. She recently gained a distinction in MA Textile Design at Norwich University of the Arts. Perry's work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is held in private collections in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe.
Artist Statement
That feeling you get when you breathe in sunlight and fresh air on a spring morning, when you see new shoots emerging lush and brilliant yellow green from the depths of winter, when you delight in jewel coloured flowers gathered into bunches of glorious beauty, when you hold a warm pebble worn smooth by the sea - these are the feelings that inspire me to create. These responses to the joy of nature are what I want to capture and evoke in my work. Sometimes representational, sometimes intuitive, always gestural in drawing or brushstrokes, my paintings and prints explore colour and pattern whilst distilling natural forms and places onto the surface.
My hope is that when you hang my work in your home it will bring you moments of joyful distraction in our frantic modern world - the impetus to pause, to escape, to relax and to restore your mind.
