Amanda Lucas Williams
 

There are, broadly speaking, 3 categories of abstract painters in Cornwall. The first are those that draw heavily on a tradition of St Ives painting;  typically borrowing motifs and techniques from modernist painters like e.g. Peter Lanyon and Ben Nicholson. To casual viewers and collectors art in this category has the look of modernist St Ives art; but it actually has none of the historical context, originality or meaning.

More decorative abstract art not obviously derived from St Ives painting - or indeed from any other tradition - is also highly conspicuous down here and would be a second category. Typically shapes and colours are applied to a canvas in a way that fills it up with bright, busy activity. This ‘busy-ness’ often has an accessible, eager-to-please quality, but is not, in the end, a substitute for real content or good design.

Amanda Lucas Williams moved to Cornwall originally to attend Falmouth School of Art, where she also completed post-graduate studies before having a family of her own.

She is one of the best examples of a third category of abstract painter that has managed to avoid the two extremes described above. Her work has a persuasive sense of design that is sparse and strong. She avoids cluttering the canvas and so her paintings are exercises in restraint, poise and clear decision-making.

Her most recent works consist of a warm monochrome ground inflected with a field of small brush-strokes that shimmer like blades of grass in the wind. On top, in most cases, is a figure that appears to have been drawn in a single stroke, which creates a 3^rd layer, and a precarious illusion of depth.

In some paintings this calligraphic figure lies abjectly coiled like discarded string, in others it is bold and posturing. In every case it is evocative, at least tangentially, of a naked and exposed animal or human form. Therefore as a device or emblem it is, surprisingly, capable of conveying a range of different psychological or emotional states which are then echoed in the rich colouring elsewhere in the painting.

Above all her paintings are highly enigmatic, such that they do not give up their secrets easily. They seem familiar, yet have a compelling strangeness that defies easy comprehension. They do, obliquely, reference Barbara Hepworth’s more biomorphic work and some of Noam Gabos curvy forms. But their scale and funkiness is much more contemporary and perhaps evocative of work from further afield: including certain American artists of our age like Jonathan Lasker, Christopher Wool, and Thomas Nozkowski.

Photos courtesy of Lemon Street Gallery

RW Jan 2007