Lisa Ivory: Artist of the Month

Artist of the Month June 2025: 
Lisa Ivory, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP.

Lisa Ivory’s landscapes are commonly occupied by a Wildman, who occasionally interacts with a female human figure. There is a Rake’s Progress of sorts, with a skeletal Death figure interrupting the discourse between these characters. The Beast attempts sympathetic magic by scrawling images into the landscape. These exchanges occur in a shadowland – a liminal space of a half-forgotten place that exists simultaneously as rural, urban and wasteland populated with anomalies, chimeras and spectres. 

Ivory’s landscapes are archaic in tone and her archetypal subjects present a paradoxical discourse including the feral and tamed; the worshipped and abandoned; the empowered and the subjugated.

CBP: Your brooding paintings steeped in a flavour of art history present nudes, beasts and skeletons in playful and sometimes violent acts in a richly lyrical sense of storytelling. Can you introduce the series and broad narrative themes in the work?

LI: This current suite of paintings is concerned with motifs and characters that interact in a liminal landscape. It isn’t clear what time of day or season we are in. A (very often female) nude takes turns with a beast or Wildman to torture and berate a figure of Death, Sometimes the characters switch roles and Death spanks the figure. The figure also acts as a kind of servant to the skeleton, protecting him with a parasol or riding shotgun on his horse. It is very much a Memento Mori combined with a sense of journey.

Humans are not necessarily haunted or overwhelmed by Death. The portrayal of skeletons being spanked or depicted as a puppet controlled by a female nude, presents a converse view of death’s power over life. This layer of macabre humour offers a satirical commentary on control, manipulation, and our ultimate fate. 

CBP: Painting history references are evocatively represented in the style and imagery of the work, Goya comes particularly to mind. Can you talk about how these histories became an influence in your practice?

LI: I have always loved Goya. He whispers in my ear a lot. I am very fond of Daumier and I reference his Don Quixote paintings-that romantic, flawed hero’s journey theme again.I think most painters have a gang of Artists that inform their personal mythologies.

Holbein’s Dance of Death is filtered through Pompeii and the Ossuary in Rome, Gravestones depicting a grinning skull before people got squeamish, depicting a literal death on a headstone.

I have also nicked a few Constable, Millet and Guardi skyscapes and fantastic ruins. 

I am as easily informed by contemporary gothic like The Walking Dead with its bleached, apocalyptic photography as I am by a Guston shoe, a Beatrix Potter rabbit, an Ensor skeleton warming itself by a stove, a Munch couple embracing or a Rembrandt fur hat.

CBP: There is a particular patina to your work, the paint like dirt and the earth. There’s gloom that evokes the heavy darkened surfaces of unrestored museum paintings or old colour reproductions in art books. Its almost like a nostalgia for art history, if these are qualities you are reaching for in your paintings?

LI: Not nostalgia at all. It’s more like waking up from a half-remembered fever dream. My palette has always been on the earthy side. I use a lot of soft blacks, dirty blues and yellowish whites. I look for a warmth to my paintings, a bit of soul. 

The classical tradition of underpainting in Umbers and Vandyke Browns is evident in every layer I paint.

It’s the colours of life and of the earth, the primordial mud, what we end up in; that interests me.

CBP: Can you discuss in more detail about the depiction of the nudes, again in their form resemble art history depictions, their features concealed or obscured.

LI: Some assume the figure stands for me-it doesn’t. If anything, I identify more with the Beast, with it’s “hairy on the inside”, to paraphrase Angela Carter. I suppose it is a short hand for a mortal wrestling with a timeless carnivalesque, existential reflection.

Sometimes they have the upper hand, inevitably they lose.

Occasionally they are male figures, but they mostly depict female nudes, a subversion of the Male Gaze They morph between the dominatrix and the submissive with the skeleton. This again references the Danse Macabre, whose steps as humans we inherently know. We are creatures of loss and realise where the dance leads us. That doesn’t rule out kicking against the pricks and laughing in the face of inevitability. It is a way of making friends with Death, or at least nodding acknowledgement on the way home.

CBP: Their ambiguous encounters with skeletons and beasts are a dance of the ‘empowered and subjugated’, as describe in your statement, flipping the roles from painting to painting. And the depiction of umbrellas adds a subtle absurdity and feels borrowed from Jack Vettriano’s, ‘The Singing Buttler’. Can you talk about this role playing and tonal shift in your work?

LI: Early animation, like the sinister but sweet ‘Silly Symphony’ “Skeleton Dance’ that references Rowlandson and Holbein and the twisted fairy tales of Jan Svankmajer are more in my realm than Vettrianno. In fact, I stole the parasols from a Guardi or Canneletto painting that depicted tiny Italian aristocrats twirling them on fantastically ruined Venetian bridges.

They also reference that sense of slavery-death is protected from the sun by a tiny human figure brandishing an umbrella-a familiar or servant in the Renfield mold.

CBP: Your expressively energetic and sketchy painting style feels imbedded in drawing. Can you talk more about the role of drawing and your approach to painting?

LI: There was a time when my practice was ALL drawing. When I rediscovered painting again, I found that I was actually drawing on the painting straight away. No preliminary sketches as such but workings out as if in a sketchbook: rubbing out and smearing away the oil paint and constantly rubbing away or making adjustments. I like to sometimes depict drawings in my paintings-a beast scrawling a chalk image on a cave wall or a skeleton brandishing a flag with a drawn nude for example. I like that referencing a two-dimensional image in a three-dimensional space, as I think paintings really are.

CBP: Describe a typical day in your studio.

LI: If I am fortunate enough to have a whole day to myself, I would first turn on the radio or some music.

I would then look at the previous day’s work and adjust or destroy it. I work on several paintings at once, hiding them from myself and looking them again when I had forgotten about them. I live in my studio-a blessing and a curse-so my butterfly brain flutters between making work and looking through my collection of art books or bouncing ideas off of my studio assistant, Elvis.

I work until it gets too dark to see the colours. I have loads of daylight lights rigged up, but it is never quite the same as real daylight. I then clean my brushes and tidy up. I review the day’s work and usually get my brushes out again to have a last fiddle.

An artist’s life in the studio is pretty dull to the casual observer. All the excitement is hopefully within the work.