Josephine Lyons

The Embodiment of Space, Time and Light

In my work I connect light to different histories and times. This started in my work in 1996 with the painting forgotten ruins (finished in 2011). *1

A painting for me reflects a kind of ghost like space, which might hold relevance to the future and the past.  In painting I am uncertain of how the representation of memories and feelings can often sit in relation to how a audience might interrupt now.

I am interested in creating uncertain backgrounds, which attach history and identify how time and narrative is embodied in painting through how we see light and experience light.

I have found light a subject that I have encountered in painting across many different times, affecting the way we encounter the present, and the representation of subjects and ideas in painting, and an understanding of a space.

Imitation of light falling naturally in painting is something I have always delighted in, the reminder of another space.

Then I found with Claude Lorrian, the unexpected clouds of light (empty space) in his drawings often behind trees, I found a sense of a journey being represented in painting. *2 With seeing Japanese painting*4, I noticed the lack of contrast normally found in the distance in landscape painting, in the middle of pictures or around lakes, creating for me a sense of unexpected escapism through imaginary spaces around the mountains. 

In J W Turner  I found pure escapism with the use of shapes in tone, using tone to frame from macro (maximiun contrast) to micro particles in one swift go, and the distance also created from warms to cool. In Renaissance art with light often being sporadic across a picture and attached to narrative such as religion, I found harmony between figures, landscape and light, influenced also by Coleridge and the Romantics. I found both Constable and Degas use tone to accentuate movement through the movement of light or shifting marks of tone following the imagined motion of the trees or the dancers. 

In work first I would like to identify how light / tone has affected a way of seeing time and space, and experience in painting. I see shadows as a way of marking time, and place, and there placement important in identifying a sense of the process of time being recorded.

With this in mind, in my painting, often I am interested in painting the experience of light sitting along the lines of perspective, and as my perspective tends to change this could be in the sky, displacing the light of different natural phenomena to create a personal understanding of space. 

I like feeding my memories and reflection back into pictures of different lights, so the space represented becomes uncertain, with ideas embedded through the connections between often different figures, landscape and sky. The tones in the figures have a rythm that match the tones in their surroundings.  I find in life, that situations greatly affect how we behave and I want this work to provide an allegory which connects history and time also to the representation of people.

I connect land, natural phenomena and sky to the people through shadows in the figure, the surroundings I represent and the experience seen.  I like the transient nature of light, and experience. 

For example, I use evening and morning light transcending into one another, in the singular action of painting, an allegory which also conveys the passing of time.

Light falls naturally in a direction, and shadows like the past, though in memory, sometimes sit in front of the experience represented. In a sky, like Prousts idea of seeing paintings within life, I often see a Turner sky mixed sometimes with a Renaissance sky, and Constable's sense of wind and air.

I would like time to be embodied in the representation of painting and connecting light. In the Van Gogh, Turner and Oxford paintings this comes through.  I connect my personal histories, my sense of identity to a painting, strong figures with uncertain backgrounds. Emotion often crops up - a notion of Love being important as well as an understanding of projection to painting.  I connect Turner, Constable to life, as they are important to how I see the world, and I find it is gratifying to connect them both in life.

*1  This painting combined a study of a man by Leonardo da Vinci with the sky and a picture of the changing area and empty spaces around Canary Wharf.