Review
Introductions to Fosse Gallery Shows:
Mick Rooney RA, September 2009:
Lucy Pratt may dwell inland, but her irresistible attraction to water, mostly saline, finds her and her motif engaged somewhere on Britain's littoral.
In her last work, apart from a still-life or two and an interior with figures, we travel from Tresco to Devon, to Sussex and over to Wales.
I like to feel that with Lucy Pratt's work the location is not over important. Her subject matter composed in the timeless
tradition takes us into the universality of teeming life; on a journey of personal observation, through little tongues of path finding paint, flicking out before us.
Brighton! I like that series of eight or so pieces. Here is the quiet esplanade, the seaside blue railings, the distinct, delightfully
calligraphed characters accompanied by a pair of canine accessories.
Lucy Pratt manages the elongated panoramas with consummate aplomb surge with small but precise actions the viewers' eyes whizz in and out,
zigzagging with delight to the next 'what are they up to?' - moment.
The pier paintings come as a small series. Here she has constructed powerful settings through which windblown, flimsy folk hold on.
Mostly, Pratt takes us to a world of the slow life in high summer where children bomb and splash fearlessly into sea or lido. Even if it
drizzles on the pier the union flags raise a damp flutter and gulls are held on the lazy updrafts.
Then there are bays strewn with cottages, tranquil havens, reclaimed after daily incomers have been swept out on the ebb.
Though I see Lucy Pratt's work as stories in paint, they do not prate, nor seek to elucidate more than the bare bones. I like that.
It suggests that she is nipping along nicely but keeping some distance from the purely illustrational.
Her work, as seen to good effect in the last two years Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, swashes and buckles. Lucy Pratt is moving well towards future motifs.
As Auguste Renoir believed -
we are but corks bobbing along on the sea of life.
