Karen Whiteson for Knapp Gallery show

Piece by the poet and author Karen Whiteson for a solo show at the Knapp Gallery, Regent’s Park in 1990.

The articulation of memory is an ongoing process in the paintings of Lucie Winterson.  It is in looking at the painting  that its imagery coalesces, blurs, resolves and blurs again.   Because they are engaged in the medium of their own construction, they are painterly.  As they exist in the nexus of their tensions, in a musically charged space, which resonates long after one has ceased to look, these paintings bring private memory into the present.

 

If they speak (or sing) of the heat of their own making, they also have the coolness of a certain investigative eye, as it seeks a visual language equivalent to the process of thought.  This investigation is traced in the motives of Diagram, of Textual Scrawl and in the images of Dissection.   ‘Dissectograms’ which refer to the body as an imago, pinned-down, impaled upon the eye.  And if this suggests a wounding of the image then that wound is also the instrument which sings the remembering body.

 

A Wonderful – to feel the Sun

Still toiling at the Cheek

You thought was finished –

Cook of eye, and critical of work –

He shifts the stem – a little –

To give your Core – a look –

 

(Emily Dickinson)