Mary Lou Lawless-Gill - BA (Hons) Fine Art
The people Mary Lou paints are real; we observe people like this in our daily lives. But these people present like an elite club. Mary Lou’s recent paintings explore her fascination with the ‘Beatniks’, a group of writers, poets and artists from 1950’s America who, she feels, may not have fully acknowledged her as a female artist. Mary Lou makes paintings in spite of these people, whom she admires and respects, reflecting on this cultural history through the paradox of an archeological dig, which employs thin, provisional layers to build dusty, airy figurative subjects and spaces. The paintings mimic the way that these artists conjured their own work and the ‘shape’ of their offerings to the world, which constantly moved and journeyed, often at speed, through elongated time.
