Artist talk - Laura Lancaster

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Northumbria university graduate and artist currently based at the Workplace Gallery in Gateshead Laura Lancaster had an exhibition in the Priestman Gallery within the University and we were all invited to hear her talk about her work. The paintings shown in the exhibition were all from different series of her work and were also all selected by Professor Eric Bainbridge who also works at the University.

She is a contemporary style painter and she also likes to experiment with the scale of her paintings, though the pieces displayed at the Priestman were all larger scale paintings. She is also interested with how changing the size and scale of an image can affect the outcome of a painting. Her paintings are based on found images that she sources from various places e.g. personal photographs and the internet. The key features in each of the paintings were highlighted by the paint and she was interested in the uncanny and the ideas of paintings being memorials of people.

She talked about the process of producing her paintings and said that she would begin by mixing all of the colours she would need in separate bowls before starting the painting at all, then she would do the paining in one sitting so that she could manipulate the paint by mixing, blending and dripping it all whilst it was still wet, only having shorter coffee breaks during the process.