Alex Leith visits the contemporary landscape painter in her spacious Worthing studio
A couple of years ago, preparing an article on the Sussex landscape tradition for ROSA, I lined up a plein-air interview with Lucy Marks, who was busy preparing the final works for her show Constable’s Walks, at the Royal Watercolour Society in London.
I was very disappointed when poor Lucy sent me an email cancelling the interview, as she’d ‘done her back in’. It was impossible, she apologised, to take me on a Downland journey in the footsteps of the great 19th-century landscapist, when she’d been rendered temporarily unable to walk. No matter: Lucy soon recovered, and her exhibition, I later heard, was a tremendous success, a near sell-out, with buyers from all over the world.
Earlier this summer, having kept up a sporadic email correspondence, and followed her frequent Instagram posts and blogs, I was pleased to meet Lucy in the flesh, at ROSA’s Issue 9 launch party, at Moncrieff-Bray Gallery just outside Petworth. The artist, who has enjoyed a long relationship with the gallery, was painting the landscape in front of her, a beautiful view over the Weald to the North Downs. It was mesmerising to watch her deftly portray, with those habitual loose brushstrokes, her impression of the clouds flying overhead, while chatting to me about the process, without taking her eyes off the canvas, or her hand off the brush.
She wasn’t being rude, she said. She was happy to chat, but it was vital to keep the thread of what she was doing. Painting a landscape, in plein-air, is a process that takes her up to four hours, and shifting her full attention away from her work might fatally flaw her attempt to ‘capture the atmosphere’ of the scene in front of us. Her task, she says, is to “chase the light”, and “encapsulate the mood of the moment.”
“You must visit me in my studio”, she continued, adding a moody hint of shadow to a multi-hued rendition of the cloud scooting above us, or one of its cousins, “and I’ll give you my full attention”. She was the one person at the garden party, I imagine, to be happy that the sky wasn’t uninterruptedly blue.
And so, two months later, I find myself sitting in her gorgeous, high-ceilinged workspace, surrounded by the paintings – in various sizes, executed in both oil and watercolour –earmarked for her forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Watercolour Society, Times of the Day. Among them, I’m pleased to see, is the completed canvas she was working on at Moncrieff-Bray.
We open our conversation discussing the careful way she themes her solo exhibitions. She likes to set herself certain restrictions, to help focus her attention, and draw a narrative thread between the 70-80 paintings in each show. Constable, in the four years he lived in Brighton, loved to walk and paint in the countryside, and 2022’s Constable’s Walks took the painter – and the viewer – along the three favoured routes he regularly followed, up to the Clayton Windmills, up Devil’s Dyke, and along the beach to Rottingdean. “I thought I’d follow in the great painter’s footsteps, and depict some of the scenes he painted, many of which have hardly changed, many of which have changed out of all recognition. And, of course, I wanted to give the works a contemporary lift”. ‘Contemporary’ is a word Marks uses frequently about her work, and the more I examine her paintings, the more I recognise its validity.
Her forthcoming show is also influenced by the work of long-dead master landscapists. “I have for many years admired the work of 18th-century artist Claude- Joseph Vernet, and also that of Camille Corot, who painted more or less a century later,” she explains. Vernet, I’m told, painted a series called Four Times of the Day consisting of four separate maritime scenes depicting morning, afternoon, evening and night. Corot, clearly influenced by his late compatriot, executed a similar series: The Four Times of Day, depicting the cycle of day and night in more rural, sylvan settings. Lucy’s latest show, titled Times of the Day, is the fruit of scores of around- the-clock plein-air expeditions she has made, from five in the morning to past midnight, painting the Sussex landscape (as well as scenes in coastal Cornwall, various foreign scenes and central London). As ever, she has worked both in oil and watercolour, equally happy in both mediums.
The sofa is one of those you sit in, rather than on, but I am inclined to drag myself out of its comforting embrace to give the paintings propped around me a closer look. The studio is a marvel: a sky-lit 1920s extension onto the early-Victorian house she lives in with her husband Andy, designed as a billiard room, before incarnations as a schoolroom and a musician’s den. Most of the paintings are 60×40 cm oils or gouaches, created in one plein-air sitting on the beach, or the Downs, or overlooking the town. On the other side of the room are a set of ‘urbanscapes’ (or ‘urbans’, as she sometimes calls them), clearly of central London streets, which demand a more detailed examination: the closer I get to them, however, the more their details disintegrate. She enjoys my surprise: “Whan you’re far away,” she says, “your eye puts the picture together. But when you’re up close, it’s just a muddle of brushstrokes.” Trying to paint traffic, she laughs, is a bit like trying to capture clouds: the shapes of the taxis and buses are stored in the memory, and reproduced in a manner that suits the atmosphere of the painting.
Lucy Marks’ mother was a landscape painter, too. Lucy sees her childhood, spent in Arundel, then Brighton, as an apprenticeship of sorts: she was so used to the tools of the trade, she hardly remembers having to master their use. Nevertheless, as a young adult, she studied literature – she was particularly interested in drama – then took up a corporate career, painting in her spare time. For the last 20 years she has been a full-time painter and during that time she enrolled on an MA in Fine Art at Brighton University, to hone her skills and enable a full-time career as a painter.
While my working day is just starting, I realise, hers is already several hours in. She works incredibly hard. “I’m an early bird: up at five, and in my studio painting at six,” she reveals. “I go out to plein-air paint most days, whatever the weather: only torrential rain will stop me. I have to paint every day: it’s like a muscle, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
She’s not precious about what she paints, unlike many of her colleagues, who will ‘traipse around for days looking for their muse’. “We’re blessed with beautiful scenery in Sussex,” she says, “between the Downs and the sea. I’m quite happy painting whatever is in front of me. Some days the paint just falls off the brush, as we say, other times it’s more of a struggle.” The important thing is to carry on regardless. “I can’t just say ‘I’m not going to paint because I’m not in the mood’. That would be like someone else not going to the office because they didn’t feel like it. No matter what happens, when you go out painting, it’s always a win.”
She is equally happy using oil or watercolour, and moves easily between them, also choosing gouache, that gooier form of watercolour, when the situation demands (it is particularly good in the rain; she uses it more in the winter months). “There’s nothing like the visceral quality of oil,” she tells me. “It doesn’t dry fast, you can push it around, and achieve a beautiful density.” Watercolour painting, she says, is “trickier: more of a one-hit wonder, you either get them right or you don’t. You’re not in charge of a watercolour painting, it has its own life.” She loves “playing with the glazes, so you’ve got colours glazing over each other, with the translucent light shining through.” Watercolour painting is finally starting to achieve the prestige it deserves, she reckons: “In America, watercolour is bigger than oil. Prices are holding their own. In the last decade it’s really shifted over here, as well.”
I tell Lucy that I feel she has achieved a ‘voice’. That I would recognise one of her paintings in a salon show, even if it wasn’t captioned. This pleases her immensely. “When I started, there was a dissonance between my watercolours and my oils. It took a while to develop my personal ‘handwriting’ across both mediums.” We get onto describing her style. “I’m an observational artist,” she says. “I am a contemporary landscapist, attempting to interpret the day, to evoke the atmosphere of the moment.” “How about ‘Modern Impressionist?’, I venture. “I like that! I might use that!”
Much of the mood that exudes from Lucy’s paintings comes from the personality of the clouds in her skies. She knows her clouds, she says, but she never attempts to depict an accurate Cumulus, Nimbus or Cirrus. “My clouds don’t look like clouds. They look like how clouds feel.” She tells the story of Monet coming to London and finding the English skies very different from those in the South of France. “He couldn’t handle it, because they moved overhead so fast.”
Many of her plein-air paintings end up as the finished article, others she uses as the basis for bigger paintings she works on in the studio, in both oil and watercolour (though never together!). She paints in silence, having found that the mood of any background music would affect the outcome of the piece she was painting: “I like to regulate my own mood.” While she is passionate about what she does, she regards it as a job. “I work to sell,” she says. “Any painter who doesn’t admit that is being ridiculous.”
Her least favourite part of the job, besides doing her admin, is the social media output she realises is a vital part of any contemporary artist’s workload. She dedicates a section of every day – usually at the end – to such matters, only taking a break from it when she’s on holiday (though she carries on painting). For several years she was also doing the Instagram feed for the Chelsea Art Society, one of several societies she is a member of.
While she prefers to plough a lone furrow as an artist, sometimes she works in groups, for the fun of it, and the camaraderie. She also appreciates the support she gets from the three galleries who represent her – in particular Moncrieff-Bray – and the societies she has been elected to in recent years. Namely the Royal Watercolour Society, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Society of Women Artists and the Chelsea Art Society. It’s been no mean feat being made a member of such august institutions. “You need to be accepted into their open exhibitions several years running, which is difficult when they choose around 200 works from several thousand entries. Then you need to attract enough votes to be put on a candidate list, after which you have to show your portfolio, and nowadays your social media sites, too, in the hope of being made an Associate member. Then you have to show continued progression in your work, and of course active participation in the society to become a full member. When you get in, let’s say you feel you deserve a drink or two to celebrate.”
Times of the Day will run at the Royal Watercolour Society’s gallery in Whitcomb Street, near Trafalgar Square, from September 7-15. She’s looking forward to the show, of course, feeling that her choice of subject matter has pushed her into new directions. The ‘nocturnes’ have been particularly demanding. “I did one painting up by Mill Hill between midnight and 4am,” she says. “I had to ask Andy to be my bodyguard as I would have felt vulnerable on my own at that time of night. And we were surprised at how many people were out and about, men with their dogs, couples in cars. I had a lamp on my head and lights shining onto my massive French easel. Andy said “Lucy, you look nuts! You don’t need to worry, no-one’s going to come near you!!”
My visit is disturbing Lucy’s efforts to put the final touches to her forthcoming show, but she’s already thinking ahead. Intrigued by the conceptual nature of her projects, I ask her what she’s got planned, when Times of the Day is done and dusted. She tells me she has “three ideas knocking around,” but, unsurprisingly, she’s unwilling to reveal, just yet, what they are. There’s nothing like curiosity and anticipation to whet the appetite: I will be following Lucy Marks’ modernly impressionistic career with great interest.
See more of Lucy’s work at lucymarks.co.uk. You can follow her on Instagram at instagram.com/lucy_marks_art