Artist Focus is a new feature focusing on the work of a specific Project Ability artist. This week, we begin with Aspire artist, Lesley Nimmo, whose solo exhibition Selected Paintings opened in the gallery yesterday. Following the popularity of Lesley’s bird series exhibited in mono 2011, an extensive selection of Lesley’s recent paintings can be viewed in the gallery for the first time.
In the gallery, Lesley’s works will be exhibited next to their starting points, the source material she initiates her paintings from, in order to give the viewer the opportunity to see Lesley’s distinctive way of seeing and creating imagery.
The subject of the painting is not the starting point itself, but it offers a place where we, the viewers, can stand, a place where the artist stood and looked too. In isolation, her work appears abstract at times and offers little with which to create a relationship, except with her other paintings. Using paint on paper, Lesley adopts a graphic rather than naturalistic style where the paint is allowed to behave like itself. At other times harnessed, her method controls swathes of bright paint into sections and outlines which create figures haloed by swooping rainbows of dynamic colour and often punctuated with a smiley face.
Every piece does its own thing in developing the image, somewhat comical, abstract and fragile, Lesley creates works that are utterly singular, autonomous and significant as pieces in their own right. The compelling result reinforces the pliability and inventiveness of her technique.
Selected Paintings is an exhibition that displays ‘an act of painting’, with the term ‘painting’ stretched and cajoled across the works on display next to their real life partners. Paint is everywhere, the gallery alive with the energy, ideas and the representation of a very distinctive artistic vision.
Don’t miss Lesley’s solo exhibition which continues in Project Ability Gallery until 29 September.
