Lucy grew up in Cambridge knowing that she wanted to be an artist from a very young age. She graduated from Central St Martin’s School of Art, London, in 1995 and has been exhibiting ever since. Her first solo exhibition was at the Bruton Street Gallery, Mayfair in 1997 and she has gone on to show regularly with many well-established galleries including Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath, Medici Gallery, Cork Street and Fairfax Gallery in London and Norfolk. Lucy is currently showing and selling a selection of limited edition prints from Knepp Wilding Shop in West Sussex; her smaller scale charcoal and chalk originals and limited edition prints from The Red Dot Gallery in Norfolk,and soon to be showing with a Knightsbridge gallery in their new sister gallery opening in Autumn 2024- watch this space! Lucy has built up a loyal following of independent commissioners both in the UK and internationally.
“Drawing for me is a passion – I adore drawing – I am happiest with a stick of compressed charcoal and a roll of Fabriano. Halfway into a piece of work I can completely lose myself and begin to feel the animal coming alive. I aim to capture a moment of spirit and energy, the essence of that animal, its character, weight, texture, attitude and presence.
Gathering source material at the outset of an idea is something I relish and is essential in understanding the animal; visiting smallholdings, meeting and talking to farmers, breeders and zoo keepers up and down the country. Every animal I produce I have met – with one or two exceptions – the dodo skeleton in the bowels of the Natural History Museum was useful to measure proportions.
I choose to model my sculptures in wax, which captures beautifully the textures of feathers, fur and hide. I love to see my fingerprints on the surface of the finished bronze. I find the ancient alchemy of producing a bronze a mysterious and thrilling process.
I have been influenced by a wide range of people: Picasso; Dürer; Stubbs, Paula Rego; Elizabeth Frink; Claes Oldenburg; Adam Ant; Liberace; Hillaire Belloc; Christian Lacroix; Roberto Cavalli and Alexander Mcqueen are all people whose style and wit I admire and growing up surrounded by the architecture of Cambridge helped me develop my appreciation of all things beautiful and uplifting”.
“She catches her animals mid-move, mid-breath, and often with food on their minds. You get that sense of weight, its distribution and momentum. What Lucy has, apart from a lot of application and talent, is a subject matter that she adores, and that leads to big-hearted, celebratory pictures. Her creatures have dignity as well as humour. The pig and chicken in the shop are, to my eyes, heroic”.
Delaval Astley, Back to the Garden, Letheringsett, Holt.
“No one gets the softness of fur like Lucy.Or the hardness of pangolin scales. Or the whiteness of white ,which,considering her medium is essentially black,is nothing short if miraculous”.
Lizzie Riches, painter.
