Artists – L

Dick Lee is widely admired as an exceptional painter, one of the very best of his generation. His discipline of direct and faithful observation of nature can be traced straight back to Constable and sits firmly within the great British landscape tradition.Born in Rhodesia he went to Camberwell in 1947, joining the generation of young painters who, like him, had served in the war. Through the guidance of Coldstream and their Euston Road teachers they looked for an objectivity that was then new in English painting.Dick Lee was one of the most important followers of this approach. In his landscape paintings, painted on the spot, Lee sought to put down the essence of the subject whether it was a cricket match at the Oval or the hot afternoons and August sands of Normandy where he had a home. He had the ability to go straight for a particular moment or conjunction of time, light and place. His painting is admired for the lightness of his touch and the freedom of his handling of paint across the surface of the canvas as well as the organisation of the work, the pictorial space and construction. Lee was at his most radical in watercolour, oil pastel and gouache. These pictures have, as in many of Turner’s and all of Cezanne’s works on paper, the quality of private meditation. The watercolours possess a supreme economy of means; thin fluid washes floated across the paper until the subject emerges with gentle force.

Jane writes about her painting:I live in rural Suffolk and am an abstract painter using oil and watercolour.The landscape is my starting point for painting - I walk through it everyday in all weathers, allseasons often taking the same path, seeing the same fields, trees and woods etc. There aresuperficial changes daily though the underlying structure remains constant. In this way theelements add to my internal visual vocabulary. Colour, tone, shape, line, weather, temperature, light and shade all coalesce and distil and will atsome point contribute to a painting.Jane has exhibited throughout the UK, including the Royal Academy and Bankside Gallery and is an elected member of the Royal Watercolour Society

After an early career as a specialist furniture painter Lucy trained at Colchester School of Art and then continued to learn sculptural techniques with sculptor Miles Robinson in Suffolk.Lucy lives and works on an organic farm near Colchester and finds inspiration in the history of this medieval settlement. The surrounding landscape, found objects and the cyclical continuity and balance of nature have moulded her creativity for over thirty years and are key sources of inspiration, influencing the flowing sculptures which evolve into birdlike or botanical forms reduced to simpler, abstracted ideas. The work of contemporary sculptor Bridget McCrum inspires and informs Lucy's work as does the work of Barbara Hepworth.