Nature has fed inspiration to man since the beginning of time but the symbiotic relationship we used to have with it has waned. In an age of default detachment from the natural world, Lucie Winterson seeks to reassess our relationship with it through her art.
Her most recent series ‘Nature is Imagination’ seeks to be a collaboration with nature – and a refusal to define or rewrite it. Her unusual style sees her use photographs of natural places as a canvas, to which she applies pigments, earths and acrylic paint. She talks of how she watches the two layers merge – not only with one other but also with her own creativity: “I don’t ‘paint’ so much as facilitate the natural alchemy and movement of the materials as they interact with each other. I like to combine the technological rendering of nature as it appears in photographs, the facilitation of the nature in the materials and my own nature in the looking and doing.”
The hazy, mystical images of the natural world are thought-provoking with their innate suggestion that nature and imagination define each other. The result is what makes her work so effortlessly unique. Her paintings are an organic blend of the nature captured and its synthesis with both instruments of art and her imagination.
“To the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself” William Blake
Images source: luciewinterson.co.uk