Lizzie Little (She/her)
I am a contemporary figurative artist. I depict the human figure, faces, characters, from life, also combining found imagery and archive to create narratives that may describe a theme. My practice realises the work through combinations of graphite, conte crayon drawings, etchings, printmaking and oil on stretched linen and canvas.
Current themes I am exploring include, contemporary depictions of Venus and Mars in domestic settings, that may borrow and reinterpret themes and metaphors from allegorical traditional practices, such as Vermeer, Velazquez, Botticelli to more contemporary post-war practitioners such as Hockney and Freud.
Themes in the artwork explore personal experiences and possibly lived narratives, but are depicted through the anonymous characters I collect. This allows me as an artist to remain anonymous through the work and allows the viewer to collage and impose themselves into the imagery.
Future work may lift my veil of anonymity if I explore myself as a subject in my practice. Some of my work will be shown physically at Part Two of the Alternative Degree Show Festival across Glasgow in July 2021. (https://www.thealternativedegreeshowfestival.com/home)
I am the co-founder and co-host of the life drawing group, Glasgow Portrait & Figure, (formerly known as The Portrait and Life Collective). Olivia Macdonald (MLitt Painting) and I began the group in November 2020 for the students of GSA in response to the pandemic’s affects on the studio, and to supplement the life room, due to our inability to get in and draw. We have been running the classes weekly, up until late May of this year, working with models online in Glasgow and Edinburgh, all the way to Germany and Washington D.C. In September 2021, Macdonald and I will be launching publicly under the new name Glasgow Portrait & Figure, however our ethos is very much the same: a core value for observational drawing, as well as a nurturing a sense of community and creative endeavour that is synonymous with the life room. See the website for enquiries and future class tickets.
Contact
The Lovers Triptych
The delicacy and destruction of closeness. The fine line between love and resent. Are these images a study of closeness or a study of distance? These notions are evocative of the current pandemic, but also how I perceive true depictions of intimacies to be. The scenes I envision are tense, intimate, dramatic and theatricality constructed, but juxtaposed with an ambiguous, yet identifiable, domestic interior allows you to inhabit its space. I am aware of the viewer in my work, as are the images themselves; there is a functionality to them, to be looked at and consumed and I like that. The images I create are entirely dependent on the two figures; I find having multiple figures occupying the space far more interesting and loud with narrative, than I do with an isolated figure. These are paintings of people, but they are not portraits.
The Lovers Triptych is a series of three paintings that explore the transitional stages of intimate relationships within the domestic setting. They are an exploration into contemporary depictions of Venus and Mars, inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s 1483 panel painting ‘Mars and Venus’. Each painting has a separate and contained narrative, as well as bearing a relationship as a triptych and timeline of how relationships mature and change. Are these a study of closeness or distance?
Silence is a Scary Sound, The Lovers Triptych
Silence is a Scary Sound, The Lovers Triptych
Oil on linen
123 x 138 cm
Silence is a Scary Sound is symbolic of young love. Their relationship is youthful, passionate, but tempestuous and slightly naive. You have walked into the thick silence, following the chaos of an argument they have just had. They do not look at each other nor you, and the tension becomes the unwanted third person in the image.
The Lovers Triptych is a series of three paintings that explore the transitional stages of intimate relationships within the domestic setting. They are an exploration into contemporary depictions of Venus and Mars, inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s 1483 panel painting ‘Mars and Venus’. Each painting has a separate and contained narrative, as well as bearing a relationship as a triptych and timeline of how relationships mature and change. Are these a study of closeness or distance?
The Compromised, The Lovers Triptych
The Compromised, The Lovers Triptych
Oil on linen
123 x 138 cm
The middle painting of the series depicts the middle age of life and marriage. Our couple have learnt to compromise in their everyday life and perhaps in love. Their affection has become subtle and covert, but nevertheless runs subliminal through their relationship and the image. They do not have to prove their love, and their confident and confronting gaze is reflective of this, but their lack of expression has become emotionless, and for all their closeness on the sofa, they are somewhat distant from one another.
The Lovers Triptych is a series of three paintings that explore the transitional stages of intimate relationships within the domestic setting. They are an exploration into contemporary depictions of Venus and Mars, inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s 1483 panel painting ‘Mars and Venus’. Each painting has a separate and contained narrative, as well as bearing a relationship as a triptych and timeline of how relationships mature and change. Are these a study of closeness or distance?
Burnt Toast on Tablecloth, The Lovers Triptych
Burnt Toast on Table Cloth, The Lovers Triptych
Oil on linen
123 x 138 cm
The burnt toast on the tablecloth is the locality of this love. Through the food she prepares and the warming tea she stews, she pours her love into this domestic space, and yet he seems to resent it.
The Lovers Triptych is a series of three paintings that explore the transitional stages of intimate relationships within the domestic setting. They are an exploration into contemporary depictions of Venus and Mars, inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s 1483 panel painting ‘Mars and Venus’. Each painting has a separate and contained narrative, as well as bearing a relationship as a triptych and timeline of how relationships mature and change. Are these a study of closeness or distance?
Character Studies
Drawing is at the heart of my practice and discipline.
These drawings of the isolated figure are not portraits, but character studies and resolved pieces in themselves. My paintings of figures are constructed and imagined, but with their foot firmly within reality, with their origin in an archive of found imagery from photography I have come across in different media. I choose which figures I want to combine together through the initial act of drawing them. Through reinterpreting their character through drawing, I am able to gain a sense of their narrative, and thus my final image is born by fusing separate source material that did not exist in a time frame or source until I put them together.
Etchings to follow.
