Lesley Olacker
Artists Statement
‘The surfaces her faceless, emaciated figures stand upon seems reflective, meaning the figures never really end, bleeding into the landscape like flowing trees.’
Lesley Oldacker’s elegiac paintings are born from quiet observation. The artist collects the inspirations for her paintings from traumatic events consumed through the media. These landscapes of struggle echo a cry of human disquiet that calls to Oldacker, ushering the artist to look inward to her inner vistas of rejection, trauma, isolation, and a yearning of belonging.
Equally, the artist will physically survey teeming urban spaces, attempting to see figures as individuals, creating separate narratives for them: pulling from them a created identity to cradle them with. Oldacker is steeped in empathy for the suffering of others and so uses her paintings to connect the viewer to these experiences. Her figures are faceless and often collected in buzzing hoards against cold or dystopic backgrounds, bringing to light themes of identity, abandonment, disassociation, and the brittle gelidity of contemporary society.
Yet there is always one amongst the throng that stands out; a figure which we begin to see ourselves in. This figure acts both as a mirror to our own internal anguish and tempts us to consider a more universal state of suffering.
These exterior and interior observations provoke her drawings and paintings. The memory or observation of a scene will inspire formal qualities like composition to blossom on her canvases, and equally will recall personal emotive tensions that will infuse the work with an impassioned depth.
Oldacker slathers layers of oil paint on her canvases, enjoying its fluid and malleable propensity, aligning with her expressive process of addition and subtraction. Her colours are simple, often neutral with a subtle contrast of a warm ochre occasionally appearing in her canvases. Her palette is entirely fitting to her pensive, melancholic subject matter. Any addition of jocular vibrance would be an inappropriate and jarring distraction to these scenes of collective isolation.
These figures and observational scenes are abstracted by Oldacker. The surfaces her faceless, emaciated figures stand upon seems reflective, meaning the figures never really end, bleeding into the landscape like flowing trees. Oldacker wants this to be a primary reminder for her viewer: that all humans are part of the same landscape, that we share the same roots, the same beginnings, the same ends.
For more information: https://www.lesleyoldakerfineart.com