MemberPrintmakingScreen PrintSolo artist

Lucy Merriman | Interactions

posted by POP Members January 25, 2022

Lucy Merriman creates vibrant mixed media artworks and limited edition prints focusing on printmaking processes and painting. Her work is abstract and semi-abstract, often combining graphic form with layers of gestural brushstrokes.

The Hackney Marshes lie just 500m from Lucy’s front door, and with the pandemic restricting her movements she was drawn closer into this landscape. The daily routine of walking across the marshes provided calm; a necessity that became a large influence on her new body of work, Interactions.

The importance of this landscape became integral, and these fundamental feelings are reflected through Lucy’s use of emotive colour and expressive brushstrokes, capturing a personal response to the energy and beauty of the urban-rural landscape often lost or taken for granted. Lucy is fascinated by the use of colour and how it can influence feeling and change perception, prompting interactions that ‘feel’ rather than ‘see’. Recurring themes of opposites using a blend of analogue and digital processes explore interactions with the natural and the hyperreal, blurring the lines of what is real and imaginary.

“I have worked with colour for many years as a print designer and trend consultant in the fashion & sportswear industries. It is something that is intuitive to me, I have a strong connection to it…”

Lucy uses a blend of analogue and digital printmaking processes combined with acrylic painting. Preliminary colour studies in the form of sketches, photography, and collage are developed in the studio. Layers of acrylic paint are then energetically applied and wiped back, photographic images are stripped into their raw forms, and screen printed layers of silhouetted forms merge from foreground to background. Digital experimentation creates unexpected colour that distorts reality prompting a new response. These studies then inform painting and traditional printmaking, and the cycle continues.

Working digitally in design has given me huge creative scope over the last 25 years but I felt I wanted to return to a more organic process. The movement of paint and the unexpected imperfections of printmaking give greater expressive depth to my work”.

Each of the works in the Interactions series was created from acrylic on plywood with hand-pulled screen print. Framed in a wooden tray frame with a lime wash finish, each piece is signed and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity. Limited Edition prints are also available in A2 & A3 sizes with archival pigment inks on 308 gsm on Hahnemühle Photorag.

Born and raised in Birmingham Lucy currently lives and works from her studio close to Hackney Marshes, East London. She is an associate member of East London Printmakers.

You can catch Lucy at The Other Art Fair – London, 17th – 20th March 2022, The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane.

www.lucymerrimanart.com
@lucymerrimanart

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