Lisa Carter Grist Conwy, United Kingdom
I am an artist living and working in North Wales. Working predominantly with painting and drawing I am primarily concerned with the way in which mark making, abstraction and figuration work together. My paintings and drawings are responses to the landscape, figuration and the nature of my own painting. I keep my subject and process deliberately unplanned.
My approach is largely intuitive, using collected references and fragments of previous works in an unplanned but studied impulsive manner allows for my compositions to arise unknown from gesture, repetition and the trace of marks overpainted and removed. I frequently switch up orientation and materials for their inherent qualities, often reworking paintings over long periods of time assessing each mark, form and colour for its associativity, also making immediate works alongside. It is the paintings themselves that surprise and direct my next move as I watch for evidence of spontaneity and listen out for communcation coming from the work. The boundaries between reality and imagination play a large part in my approach. The paintings do not persist with the same starting points from with which they began. The gestures and marks that I make whilst painting try to meet words, thoughts and things seen, each element reaching out. It is the unpredictability and the transformation that inspires me, this shifting, improvised in between space that I am compelled to explore, a world where everything communicates freely with everything else.
