Young Allium
Top five galleries - 1. Emily Patrick
The Times, September 8th 2007 by Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Infused with delicate light and tranquility, these still lifes, portraits and landscapes reveal the meditative focus of a virtuoso painter.
Emily Patrick at the Air Gallery
The Week, September 15th 2007
These 50 paintings by Emily Patrick were completed in the last two years. There are landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, plant studies, a naked girl, a bowl of coots’s eggs, and a stuffed godwit (a more delicate bird than it sounds). In an unostentatious way, Patrick casts her net wide for subjects, and the resulting work is more unconventional than it seems at first glance. For landscapes she often adopts a close-up, worm’s-eye-view – as in Sky behind Crinums, where pink flowers loom untidily against a brilliant blue sky; and to paint the landscape study, Small Horizontal Heifer, she lay on her stomach. Unusually, Patrick mixes oil and tempera, and paints on a variety of surfaces, but the rough, breezy brushwork remains consistent throughout, giving both airiness and deths, and adding a sensuous quality to an intimate and sensitive group of portraits.
Art Quarterly Autumn 2007
Emily Patrick’s paintings are beautiful and arresting: her studies of plants often depict the stalks and leaves rather than the flowers; her interiors draw their inspiration from her family home, with children’s toys lying around which might themselves become the subject of a painting; and her landscapes, which are influenced by her childhood on a farm, are painted from a low level, giving the sensse of lying in the grass looking up.
Nature and Intimacy
This is London, September 7th 2007
An exhibition by Emily Patrick, an outstanding British painter, is not to be missed. She will be showing over fifty works at The Air Gallery until 21 September.
Emily Patrick has been described as a “latterday Impressionist” and she is often considered to be one of the most talented figurative artists of her generation. She paints exquisite domestic scenes, portraits, landscape and still lifes. Patrick’s paintings do not seek out the spectacular. She delights in quiet, often eccentric, details or compositions that demand us to create narrative. She achieves an extraordinary sense of presence, often a deep sense of calm. One feels as though one is being shown the poetic spirit of each subject.
Within the calm there is much excitement. She has the skill of a virtuoso with her application of the paint. The brushwork ranges from fine, nervous, delicate to strong, bold and brave. Her beautiful sense of colour adds to the magic. The colours range from pure, vibrant, primary pigment to subtle tones of warm grey.
Patrick grew up on a farm in Kent, did not go to art school, instead she studied Architecture at Cambridge University. This is her tenth solo show in London. If you have to miss the show, you can see a preview of the exhibition on the website: www.emilypatrick.com but the vitality of her work and the quality of her paint defy reproduction.
Critic’s choice
Financial Times, September 8th 2007 by Jackie Wullschlager
Work from the past two years from this distinctive figurative painter, a 21st-century intimiste who combines intense technical accomplishment – she works on birch ply with gesso, using tempera for meditative, translucent effects and oil for fluid fast strokes – with a vibrant expressiveness and an airy feel for light and colour. Most compelling is the sense of interiority, half melancholy, half rapturous, in the still lifes of flowers, set against mirrors or dark furniture and the sense of nature condensed yet uncontrollable, bursting to the picture’s edges, in the landscape close-ups.