easy hard

November 21 - Decemberr 19, 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marie Le Lievre's practice is a poetry both personal and universal - a layering of drawing into painting that is delicately and determinedly interwoven. Both disciplines, drawing and painting that is, require touch. Le Lievre's mode of painting involves pouring and paddling - a sensitivity to touch and viscosity - as medium is tipped and bled into oil paint creating lightness like lichen-creep across shimmering darkness.

Here in this new body of work, this signature filigree is often echoed by fine charcoal lines "scribbled" onto the oil paint. Drawing quite literally joins painting. And Le Lievre's hand very obviously inscribes and animates her painted fields. A sense of movement and fluidity pervade both forms of mark-making, so the paintings seem almost to speak with one mind.

In Char Stoked (Notes) for example, a rich Madonna-like blue is heavily rendered with variously angled and rubbed charcoal lines. The whole is then plugged with a resonant magenta. In High (Notes), a similar energy of line and tone is busy like a thought-bubble, and connected tentacle-like to the painterly field below - an area typically duck egg blue beneath sensuous shades of darker blues and blacks.

 

But in the majestic title work of the show, the colour sense is different and there is plenty of it. Rarely has Le Lievre attempted to bleed and merge so many layers of crimson, yellow, orange and greeny blue. As she herself would have it, "this really was easy hard"! And one wonders whether we'll ever see the likes of it again.
JS

 

Selected works

Please hover over image to see title...

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

Works on paper

 

 

 

 

List of works

Easy Hard (Slipping)     oil on canvas     1780 x 1580mm    
High (Notes)     oil & charcoal on canvas     1800 x 1650mm    
Luck (Notes)     oil & charcoal on canvas     1800 x 1650mm    
Found (Easy Hard)     oil & graphite on unstretched canvas    1500 x 1500mm    
Char Stoked (Notes)     oil & charcoal on canvas     1010 x 1010mm    
Paint (Notes)     oil & graphite on canvas     800 x 800mm    
Sage's (Table)     oil & charcoal on canvas     760 x 760mm    
Dog Tamer's (Table)     oil on canvas     900 x 900mm    
Mermaid's (Table)     oil & graphite on canvas     1010 x 1010mm    
Stoner (Table)    oil & charcoal on canvas     760 x 760mm    
Nick Namer (Table)     oil on canvas     510 x 510mm    
Clementine (Table)     oil on canvas     510 x 510mm    
Hail Noted (Easy Hard)     oil & charcoal on canvas     1150 x 1150mm    
Fallow (Easy Hard)     oil & graphite on paper     760 x 560mm    
Day Sure (Easy Hard)     oil & graphite on paper     760 x 560mm   
Hedgerow (Easy Hard)     oil & graphite on paper     760 x 560mm    
Orange Trench (Easy Hard)     oil & graphite on paper     760 x 560mm    
Pink Stream (Easy Hard)     oil & graphite on paper     760 x 560mm    
Afternoon (Easy Hard)     oil & graphite on paper     760 x 560mm    

All works are from 2018