“My state of reverie is maintained by close attention to the physical details of my life.

Protected from and on occasion engulfed by the trivia of existence, my goal has always been to find the moment when all goes still…”

Evelyn Williams: Images and Words 1998

Painting, good painting that is, derives much of its power from the tensions the artist intuitively sets up, the tensions between lines and forms, colours and textures of a work becoming the unmistakable metaphors for the physical and metaphysical of its subject matter, their successful resolution the cause of the emotions it may arouse in us.


For the visionary figuration of Evelyn Williams (b1929) those sensations of stillness and reverie that she so clearly intended her paintings of children, dreamers and sleepers to convey, find their origins, paradoxically enough, as she herself acknowledges in the passage above taken from one of her studio notebooks, from “ a close attention to the physical details of my life” and “ the trivia of my existence.”


A very similar set of artistic understandings would seem to lie behind Lisa Wright’s paintings which, for all the obvious difference in their technique and methods, even apparent subject matter (not to mention a huge gulf in age), nonetheless convey the same overriding sensation of a precarious and delicate balance being maintained over great abysses of feeling, moments of tentative poise between one place and another, again deriving largely out of acute and tender observations of the intimacies and tensions of her immediate family life and circumstances.


As she has observed of herself “It is important for me to be living and breathing in an environment which I can either be in or revisit with ease in order to be reacquainted or reinspired as the work develops.”


With her move to Cornwall from East London five years ago this painting environment has gradually expanded and developed in a kind of harmonic relationship with the changed patterns of her life; a second son (Theo) has, from his birth in 1999, now also become a consistent theme in her painting – asleep on the folded acreages of her bed, tottering precariously on high table tops, exploring through the open doors of the house – while his older brother Max is seen embarking on more adult pursuits, in particular it would seem here, a passion for swimming, both by himself, with friends or in the company of his younger brother at the poolside!


In short Lisa Wright’s life is steadily becoming ever richer and fuller, a situation which seems to be directly reflected in the range of themes and subjects she now wishes to take on as her family life begins to move out and beyond the more purely domestic interiors that dominated her work of even just a few years ago into more public arenas.


If all this implies a kind of Vuillard-like intimism in her work that would give a quite false impression of the boldly artistic and intensely painterly means through which she chooses to explore such themes. A broad, confident handling of paint, a subtle feel for colour and a strong sense of abstract form have always given to her work its fundamental sense of an extended, often extensive space (something to which the luminosity of Cornish light has now added a further significant dimension) that creates stages onto which these intimate scenes are then, quite literally, drawn.


For it is, as ever in Wright’s work, through the tautness of her drawing that these paintings finally achieve their subtle human understandings, relationships often rehearsed beforehand in powerful ink wash preparatory studies before being translated into the painted lines on the canvas. It is in a curious way though the drawn element of the newest paintings in this group, the swimming-pool scenes like 'Floating' or 'After the Butterfly' for example, which now seems to be used with a growing subtlety and economy of means – we are, quite simply less aware of the drawing though it is in fact as crucial as ever to the composition’s final effect.


What are they about? Words used to describe a painting can, at best, only convey a parallel dimension though these children, floating between air and water, poised tentatively between land and water, balanced precariously between one level and another or moving from one space to another intimate, sensations of passages, movements of thought, indications of that sense of independence and moving away that is implicit the moment a child is born – heartbreaking yet essential - while, at the same time, in the very tension of the lines hinting at the threads that connect us back to friends and family love.


But, like all good painting, its power ultimately resides in its ambiguity, its ability to suggest a multiplicity of sensations and feelings at one and the same time - in works like Little Swimmers or Still Pool this can be read, at one level, as a straightforward expression of motherly love and affection entirely free of sentimentality, yet at the same time suggesting heights and depths with that economy of means of which only painting finally seems capable.


Nicholas Usherwood. 2003.