A painting by Rachel Lancaster of a shiny red balloon 

With a focus on painting’s intersections with cinema, photography and music, Rachel Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, from found moving imagery and her own photographs. While drawing on the traditions of still life and vanitas painting, she depicts detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering these fragments both descriptive and abstract, ambiguous and open-ended. 

‘Balloon’ draws on found imagery from a 1980s horror film - a rich source of imagery for the ‘stills’ that Lancaster paints. To create the work, she applied multiple thin layers of paint to the canvas, causing a variety of optical effects: the immediacy of the painted surface plays off against the hazy, half-remembered, just out-of-reach quality of the image. Cropping, colour and mark-making are manipulated, to play upon the latent otherness and dreamlike qualities encountered in both cinema and painting.

Rachel Lancaster

Related Artist

Rachel Lancaster

London

Newcastle