Lily Macrae, Winsor Green (2022)

Lily Macrae,
Winsor Green (2022),
Oil on paper,
25 x 18 cm

About Lily Macrae

b.1994 Edinburgh, Scotland
Lives and works Glasgow, Scotland

Creating work which draws so much influence from old masters such as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Eugène Delacroix, suspends my work somewhere in between the past and present.

Re-imagining these stories to highlight their power, beauty, and often absurdity, I am exploring the role they play within a contemporary narrative and the ability they have to deliver a timeless portrayal of humanity.

I reinterpret these iconic scenes to learn from the human architecture, playing with the traditional intentions of the imagery. I want to honour each works ancestry whilst questioning our ineluctable relationship with the past.

Drawn to the fleeting nature of the painterly gesture, I am using the process of painting itself as being an act of both excavation and construction. Each painting is an attempt to capture an image within the spontaneous gesture, to encapsulate this feeling of touch and fleeting movement. I want to produce works that feel timeless, as if caught in the movement of a moment.

I paint in an almost negative way, applying the paint only to remove most of it, searching through each layer for earlier shape and form, whilst attempting to reveal what lies beneath the surface. Each painting is an excavation process, as I attempt to visualise something that has been forgotten.