Blue Elastic and Beetroot
Top five galleries - 1. Emily Patrick: Three Years’ Painting
The Times, September 17th 2010 by Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Shining with light, shaded by darkness, a show of recent paintings by Emily Patrick captures the freshness and intensity of everyday life.
Cultural Life
The Independent, September 17th 2010 by Jilly Cooper
I saw a preview of Emily Patrick’s work for an exhibition in London next week. She is like the Wordsworth of the art world, painting the countryside in a delicate way. In my latest book ‘Jump’, the hero gave his mistress a painting by her.
In praise of older women
Financial Times, December 17th 2010 by By Jackie Wullschlager
...It is difficult to imagine such splendid monasticism today. Some of the best women artists in their fifties, though, work away from the media glare and conceptual buzz. Stone–carver Emily Young, who inspired the Pink Floyd song ““See Emily Play”, and painter Lucy Jones, who sold to New York’s Metropolitan Museum in her twenties, are middle–aged female artists at the top of their game who achieved early recognition but now work in seclusion and have never had the public retrospectives they deserve. One of my favourite shows of 2010 was of Emily Patrick’s intimiste still–lifes. Patrick has no dealer, organises a small show every three years, and lives reclusively in south London, protecting her vision of art’s everyday transcendence.
Will these be the grandes dames of mid–21st century art? The belated triumphs of Bourgeois, Rego and Kusama show that the tortoise is as likely to win as the hare. It is certain that as women enjoy ever–longer careers, their role in art history will, thrillingly, be rewritten again and again.
Critic’s choice
Financial Times, September 18th and 19th 2010 by Jackie Wullschlager
This intimiste painter works in oil on a tempera base on gessoed panel, creating small, exquisitely composed, tactile canvases, expressive yet restrained and at once instantly arresting and demanding slow looking. Her strengths — flowers, often in cropped, close-up detail, and still-lifes such as the wonderfully toned “Blue Elastic and Beetroot” and “Carrots on Venetian Plaster” — are in this show more assured than ever; I am less persuaded by her narrative works and landscapes with figures, which risk whimsy. But in all Patrick paints there is airiness, sense of presence, and the freshness of an independent vision.