Lucy Threlfall is an artist based in Chelsea and north Hertfordshire. Her work almost entirely takes the form of oil paint on canvas: naturalistic, expressive portraits painted from life rather than photographs and large gestural landscapes that fuse observations of nature with imagination and memory. With both portraiture and landscape, her process starts with drawing in front of the model or outside in nature to capture the essence of the subject and then working from the drawings and using memory to amplify her impressions, she constructs the final piece.
Having both a classical training in Italy and a masters degree in fine art and printmaking, Lucy has technical skill combined with a contemporary feel. With 25 years of experience taking portrait commissions, Lucy has exhibited with the Royal Society of Portraits Painters at the Mall Galleries, at Christie’s in the Garrick Milne prize with a portrait of Jimmy Carr and in 2021 she took part in Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, winning her heat with a portrait of the singer Celeste.
“Whether I’m starting with a person or a place I will begin with a drawing to help me understand what the subject is and then use the more intriguing or inventive marks to help me frame an eventual painting. The drawing also embeds in the memory, so that back in the studio I can sink into that memory and pull out what interests me and rearrange things to tell the story of that encounter.”
Combining observation with imagination, Lucy describes how the natural world speaks about our human condition – the light, the form, the feeling of a place seem to tell us a story about ourselves. Studies from nature become springboards for ideas and figures that emerge spontaneously and start to tell their stories. Recently these figures have come from the world of classical mythology and Lucy uses old master depictions as well as classical texts as a source of inspiration. Certain narratives and archetypes, particularly those connected with metamorphosis, have particular power for Lucy and help her to explore aspects of being in an unconscious way.