Rosalind Lyons has long been fascinated by the past; her paintings are strongly indebted to the Renaissance art of Italy and Northern Europe, Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits and influenced more recently by Shakespeare’s plays.
Her practice involves the creation of an interdisciplinary dialogue, where the visual and the verbal intertwine and overlap. Ideas and thoughts meander and drift; there is a strong sense of the presence of the past, the inherent ambiguity of Shakespeare’s plays and characters, the visual allusions to the Renaissance and Elizabethan England, to boy players playing girls playing boys, to the intricacies and extravagance of costume or the ethereal shimmer of candlelight on a white-painted face. It is the interweaving of silent words – what Harold Pinter called the ‘language locked beneath’ – and visual quotation, of echoes, of ghosts, of shadows, of something sensed rather than known – ‘that is, and is not’(Twelfth Night), the transience of performance and the illusory ambiguity of real and imagined memory.
Rosalind gained a BA (Hons) Visual Arts in 1990 and in 2008 a MA in Fine Art. She has experience as an illustrator and lecturer in art and design.
Original Artworks
