Lys Stevens – contemporary Scottish artist
Lys now lives part time in Gairloch and she very kindly gave me an interview for my OCA work and granted permission to use extracts and photos from her website. http://www.lysstevens.co.uk/
“Lyssie is happiest on a deserted Scottish beach, a field or glen, surrounded by colour and texture, finding endless inspiration in the interplay of land, sea and sky, light and weather. She is excited, calmed, always moved by a transient mood and is compelled to celebrate her involvement visually. She uses acrylics and sometimes incorporates other materials sympathetic to the work.”
Lys Stevens is an artist who captures the texture and fragility of textile structures within her landscapes.
Using her vast resource of photos, Lys often uses Adobe Photoshop facilities on the computer to begin to create her images. Changing and heightening colour and creating montages from several photos, these often become her working sketches.
Lys then creates beautiful, and arresting paintings. Working in acrylics, texture is often added using sari silk strands, sandpaper or even pebbles in her landscape work. The effect is one of vibrancy and yet intimate invitation to enter into and feel surrounded by her work.
As an artist Lys described for me the necessity of producing such personal visual imagery as a necessity of communicating her inner world through the visual medium.
During the years she dedicated to teaching art to young people with special needs, impressions and images caught her imagination and she promised herself that one day these would be painted. Here are relevant quotes from her web page which capture much of the conversation we had together:
“I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand”
Chinese Proverb
And also
"looking is not enough, to really see something I need to paint it"
“Lyssie studied drawing and painting and graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in the early seventies then qualified as an art specialist in secondary education. After working for some time in Mainstream, Lyssie spent many happy and fulfilling years teaching art in Special Education.”
I understood the following quote from the web page so clearly when I realsied the move Lys had made from teaching to being a full time artist.
“Lyssie has travelled many roads and is re-energised and enthused as she sets off on another long awaited path.............”
The quote also describes the actual ongoing process she engages in every time she begins new pieces of work. My time with her and constantly looking at her work left me feeling energized and excited and yet with a sense that no one artist truly knows where the journey of discovery and creativity will lead.
She was honest about some of the tensions an artist faces, such as having to go to galleries and promote her work. Or taking the constraints given by the organizers of exhibitions and painting to a size they specify in order to be considered for inclusion in the show.
We discussed the importance of context in work and apart from her obvious love and many returns to the Highland landscape in her art, there were also the practical concerns of what size of canvas can she transport in her car to galleries or exhibitions, the constraints of the studio space etc. All these hidden practical considerations are not things I had considered before.
I was really fortunate to see an exhibition in Gairloch of a collection of paintings inspired by the shoreline and hills of the Scottish Highlands. Seeing a body of work together which shared this theme and where the colours of Lyssie’s art danced and delighted my eyes was a memorable experience and will remain with us in a very tangible way as we were fortunate enough to buy our favourite canvas !
The interview time concluded with Lys generously showing me photos of her many works, including early art school pieces and direct textile work. Having avoided an embroidery module at art school for fear of being made to create traditional embroidery work, she expressed her surprise at seeing other students contemporary work and how she might well have enjoyed such a module after all ! Certainly her own embroidery pieces were exquisite.
It seems to me that Lyssie’s love of texture and textiles has found its rightful place in her work and I for one will return again and again to her work for inspiration and just sheer joy.
Esther Ward September 2010
