TEXT by ESME BLAIR

For painter Lucy Neish, the process of making is akin to a mother bird making her nest. Writer Esme Blair sat down with the artist to discuss her penchant for cuteness and treating painting like gardening.

After visiting Lucy Neish’s recent show ‘On Folding Ground’ with Rebecca Halliwell Sutton at Night Café, I had been thinking about her sepia world, somehow sun-kissed, viewed through a warm eye and lacking the oft-depressive or over nostalgic connotations of a scarcity of colour. I spoke with her on a bright Sunday in winter, stealing her time to talk about fluffy textures, ridding ourselves - and the world - of striving for perfection and Stormzy.

“I think it's something about cuteness… I think it's almost essential for something to be cute it has to be vulnerable as well.”

Lucy Neish, It's so sad. Oil on canvas, 12 x 17 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

I told Lucy the works of hers I was most compelled by are her mirror ball paintings, craggily textured canvases measuring 10 x 15 cm or so, featuring views of nightclub ceilings that shimmer silver despite their being made up of only a palette of matte greys. Simultaneously, the gaze up at the nightclub architecture is a decided detachment from the bedlam of the party below. In contrast, most of her paintings depict farmyard favourites: small creatures in nests with soft furs that entice through cosy splendour yet cut through saccharine depictions like the cute fluffed up Victoriana we would often associate with the same subject matter. ‘I think it's something about cuteness; I find cuteness or finding something cute has a duality. The things we say are 'cute' often have a vulnerability about them. I think it's almost essential for something to be cute it has to be vulnerable as well. With the nests the chicks almost go past cute; the babies become almost gross in the way they kind of combine into a mass.’ I thought about rat kings and shuddered.

Lucy Neish, ‘DON’T GET LOST’, 2024. Oil on canvas, 12 x 17 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

‘There is definitely a morbid part to them too, I have thought a bit recently about accepting that my work is quite emo.’ Emo is good for a painter! I said. ‘Yes but it's taken me a while to come to terms with that. Someone said it to me and for ages I didn't like it! I'm definitely playing with images that initially strike [me] as being tender and sweet but allowing this shadow to happen with the tone and palette.’

This morbid or grotesque quality is owed to Lucy’s staggering realism. The stillness of the very young animals in particular evokes death thanks to her ability to paint these pictures true to life even down to the individual hairs in their fur. Their vulnerability comes through in the lacking presence of a mother. ‘That's true I've never painted the mother... but with the nests, the mother’s presence is there in this structure she has created so intricately to house her babies. I can't get over the way in which a mother bird has an ability to make this house, like an inherent ability to physically build the perfect environment to house such helpless creatures.’

Lucy Neish, ‘Almost sore’, 2024. Oil on canvas, 12 x 17 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The Nest becomes the enclosed idyll - the Painting likewise - defined by its four walls in which it lies contained. Often working with a handheld scale, Lucy coats the surfaces of her paintings in a viscous matter, the application of which I noted appears emphasised as deep fissures and tall peaks due to the paintings being so petite in size. ‘Making the ground is a huge part of my making. I thought about this analogy recently that the process of making the grounds is almost like gardening; the canvases are like beds that need tending and it's a process/practice that is best approached as a daily ritual. When I get into the studio I scrape off my palette from the day before with a flat scalpel and then use the dried paint mixed with newer paint to add to the surface of the canvas.’ Waste not want not.

“…the canvases are like beds that need tending and it's a process/practice that is best approached as a daily ritual.”

‘One of the canvases I have made recently is actually just from dried oil paint that I collected... as in, there is no support, just oil paint - I think it's a bit tongue in cheek but I'm excited to make a painting that is just paint’ she says. Thus, the history of the paint provides something archaeological in the process of constructing something new.

The artist’s ground preparing process is akin to a gardener’s green thumb…

I also wanted to discuss with Lucy her book Debilitating Nostalgia, the text for which was written by fellow artist Hugo Hagger. Both the drawings and the words in the book tend to take up less than half of the page, backwardly mimicking the heavy cropping taking place in each image and giving them a magnified appearance. ‘I don't want to speak for Hugo but one thing I really took from working together on it was the way in which his ideas never felt like they were being squashed into ‘MAKING SENSE’ together. He has such confidence in his expression.’ I related to this instantly, having shared multiple conversations at private views as of late on the need some curators or artists feel to apply a running theme, a big idea, or some critical theory that risks cheapening the work and turning it into a contrived funnel of mediation for the audience. Hugo’s poems and Lucy’s drawings both share a suspended tenderness; the soft graphite accompanied by a stream of consciousness seems to circle around big and little questions enough to satisfy the lack of need for a conclusive direction. ‘I gave him the drawings. He sent me the writing. No notes - done! It worked very naturally.’

Spread from Debililating Nostalgia by Lucy Neish and Hugo Hagger. Courtesy of the authors.

‘Any references?’ I asked, since I always assume readers want to know them as much as I do. Lucy answered with the following: a collection of short stories - Men God Forgot - by Albert Cossery, and two songs she has on repeat, Stormzy’s ‘Lessons,’ and Prince’s ‘Purple Rain.’ When it comes to artists, Lucy notes she ‘can always’ look to Édouard Vuillard. ‘It’s like a mini painting lesson. Like don’t be too uptight - be loose at points, let things be off... probs shouldn‘t admit that.’ Down with perfection! See the big in the little, the microscopic and macroscopic in simultaneity.

Debilitating Nostalgia is available now.

Published Dec 4 2024.