STAMPS

© copyright The Artist

STAMPS 1986

Lisa Milroy (1959 – )

Details

Dimension
189.2 X 198.1 CM
Media
OIL ON CANVAS
Accession number
P5409

Summary

The artist wrote of this painting that she had ‘wanted to make some paintings which had a thin flat surface. A piece of paper, as an object, seemed an obvious choice for the subject of a painting; but paper that had an image of some sort inscribed on its surface seemed more interesting to paint, which resulted in some paintings of Japanese prints. Having found a direct way of painting several scenes, and then wanting to describe the surface as something more fragile than the prints had suggested, a collection of stamps became the subject of the next group of paintings. These were followed by paintings of butterflies (there is no obvious connection between stamps and butterflies, there was a similarity in how I could paint each object.) A butterfly was similar in scale to a stamp, and involved the same, small quick brushstrokes, but these marks added up to something completely different to that of a landscape or portrait. By travelling from one part of the canvas to another, the different pictures on each stamp refer to many different aspects of the world. The smallness of the image takes on a grander scale in mind.'

Cries & Whispers New Works for the British Council Collection The British Council 1988

Glossary

  • Canvas

    A piece of cloth woven from flax, hemp or cotton fibres. The word has generally come to refer to any piece of firm, loosely woven fabric used to paint on. Its surface is typically prepared for painting by priming with a ground.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.