A painting by Laura Lancaster of a figure jumping out of a tree

 (2025) by Laura Lancaster is a large oil and acrylic on linen (160 x 210 cm). The canvas presents a single, deliberately non‑identifiable figure suspended in a loosely rendered, leafy canopy: a sky‑blue dress and warm flesh tones register the body at a distance while olive and muted greens push around it in layered swathes.

From across the room the painting reads like a freeze‑frame of motion — a silhouette arrested mid‑arc — but close inspection reconfigures that impression. Broad wet‑on‑wet sweeps suggest momentum; scumbled passages and vertical drips blur limbs into foliage; wiped passages expose primed linen at the edges and thin glazes feather a shoulder into leaves. A partly erased face and a feathered limb edge make the person both legible as anatomy and porous as paint. Those specific surface gestures — wiping, scumbling, occasional crisp contouring — are the exact moves that create the work’s central uncertainty: is this flight or a precarious leap into the void?

Lancaster borrows these anonymous moments from found analogue photographs and treats their camera‑cropped framings as prompts rather than templates. In 

 the photograph’s cropped horizon, clothing details and the snapshot’s scale survive only as traces, then are enlarged and reworked by emphatic, bodily brushwork. The painting reads as part of a practice that monumentalises private snapshots into a collective, memory‑charged emblem. The leap/fall remains unresolved; the painter’s gestures both summon a story and abrade it, so the canvas keeps insisting on motion without offering a neat narrative landing.

Laura Lancaster

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Laura Lancaster