ERIN LAWLOR: @THEERINLAWLOR

First of all Erin, what is your instagram handle:

@theerinlawlor

Where are you answering these questions from?

Home, which these days is East London.

i love this question - Erin, how would you describe your work in three words?

Paint, time, fold.

Tell me about your artist career so far? How did you get to where you are now?

Essentially I’d say stubbornness! I was working very much in a vacuum for a long time – not having been through art school, and working as I was in France, which was strongly anti-painting really throughout the eighties and nineties. And juggling constantly, between parenting and paid work and trying to keep studio time. In many ways though I look back on this period as a formidable incubator, a time to both learn my medium and find my own voice. It seems hard to remember now, but in those years there wasn’t at all the same sense of necessarily managing to have a market career, and if there was it was a long-haul thing, not a recent-graduate thing. And pre-social media there was the difficulty of getting the work out there, but on the up side there was also the time to fall down and get up again (and fall down again!) without the world watching! I’d been painting for about fifteen years before I started exhibiting.

Social media completely changed the opportunities for visibility, and there was almost immediately much more interest in my work from other countries, particularly the US and Germany, where there seemed to be a more immediate understanding of what I was trying to do with paint, through their traditions respectively of AbEx and of Radical Painting. I took to curating in my last years in Paris, to counter my frustrations at the lack of painting I was seeing there.

I moved back to London in 2013, and I have found there is much more of a community here, even if the market still seems to be more geared towards figurative painting.

HAS IT BEEN A QUICK JOURNEY?

Generally speaking, it’s been a slow build over the years, very much through word of mouth, other painters suggesting my work to galleries, and then gallery shows leading to other shows… A few high points, in terms of institutions, have been my work being shown at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen in 2016, by curator Line Clausen Pedersen, and a more extensive solo survey at the Rothko Centre in Latvia in 2017. As to my current representation, I have been working with Fox/Jensen and Fox/Jensen/McCrory Galleries in Australia/NZ since 2017, and Miles McEnery NY for about two years now.

Where did you grow up ERIN, AND What did you study?

I grew up I Essex, not far from Epping - so the countryside, but at the end of the Central line, and a stone’s throw from London. I left the UK straight out of school for a year off – and ended up living in Paris for the next twenty-six years…I studied there, at the Sorbonne University; a degree in History of Art and Archaeology, a side-step from English Lit which had been my intention prior to that; and one that clearly bought me squarely back to painting as a medium of expression – logically enough in that by then I was obviously living in between two languages otherwise. Paint had the advantage of being both more universality and less explicit.

 INCREDIBLE. Your use of media is so interesting. Tell me about your artistic process, and how each work comes to be?

When I came back to painting, it was very clearly through a love of oil paint, through late Titian and Rembrandt; Manet, Soutine, and Auerbach…that was in many ways the objective of my first ten years of figurative work – simply learning and pushing the medium.

For a long time now I’ve been working on the ground, with large brushes and with very liquid oil paint, alla prima. The first few layers have to be dry enough to provide a stable base, before the work proper. Those first layers are important in that the base colours will affect those that come after, but I admit they also allow an easing into the work for me, a necessary desacralization, a doing away with the blank canvas. How the actual painting comes about is very much an organic process, a dialogue in the moment – while I may set out with a colour or a mood or a theme, I find too much intention kills a painting.

I am obsessed with your use of colour Erin. Tell me a bit about your palette. Do you plan? Is it intuitive?

Colour is such an extraordinary thing – it has the propensity of being so directly expressive and evocative, I think there is a level of synaesthesia that operates in almost everyone…There are obviously specific colours that appeal and are very evocative on their own account; yet working wet on wet, so much is about the interaction, both the juxtaposition, but also the intermingling of layers…And it’s a way of working means that it is impossible to plan specifically – nor would I want to – so much of the excitement of painting is down to being open to, and even at times surprised by, what is happening on the canvas and reacting to it – a series of micro-decisions that are barely conscious…So the use of colour is inevitably highly intuitive - but then again it is also grounded in thirty years of practice and experience that it is hard to quantify. I’ve certainly become more confident in my use of colour in recent years, the stronger cadmiums in particular.

If you had to describe yourself as a colour, which colour would you be, and why?

Blue. Ocean, sky; and just because – it’s a purely instinctive but obvious response!

AS WELL AS THIS USE OF COLOUR, What would you say is the most significant aspect of your art? And how did this come about?

The brush-mark always has been – even in my early very figurative work. And in the work of those painters who fascinated me then, and still do. The way in which a brush-mark can capture and express colour, form, even time…can be vastly evocative and endlessly open. It took me a long while to trust and go with that, to let go of the need to hang the brush-mark onto an overt subject. Much of the evolution of my work has been to do with that desire to keep the aliveness of the mark-making: over the years the brushes got bigger, the paint more liquid, and then implied the shift to working horizontally, on the ground. The main evolution in recent years has been the complexity of composition, as the works themselves expanded, combined with a greater confidence in the chromatic range.

Tell me about your earliest memory surrounding art, and when did you decide to pursue a career in art?

I can’t remember a time when art wasn’t part of the environment, both at home – the William Morris wallpaper in my bedroom in particular had an insidious presence – or outside, an awareness of exhibition posters on the walls of the Underground for example.  One seminal experience for me was the immersion in Ravel’s Garden room at the ‘Hockney Paints the Stage’ exhibition at the RA when I was in my early teens - the walls were all painted in an extraordinary electric blue, with vivid red trees stretching into the horizon…that room was a pure and almost blinding revelation of the possible effect of colour and spatial distortion – the creation of a reality other, on its own terms, just as valid.

The creative impulse was always there, from childhood, through writing or drawing and painting – everyone drew well in the family – but there wasn’t really the thought that it could be a career per se. I was in my early twenties when I realised I wanted to make painting my life’s business, but I was very aware that at the time it wasn’t necessarily something that would provide a sustained living. I rather assumed I would have to do other things to pay the bills. I still struggle with saying I’m an artist. I’m a painter, rather, anyway; that’s my medium.