A detail of a painting by Rachel Lancaster of the back of a woman's head

A painting by Rachel Lancaster of the back of a woman's head

 (2025) is a near-square, large-scale oil on linen (180 x 160 cm) that isolates a cropped fragment of a head: a cascade of red‑orange hair falling across a shoulder, a suggestion of skin, rendered against a luminous ground that graduates from pink to magenta into violet. Lancaster’s paint surface is built from successive thin glazes on a bright ground; from a distance the image reads like a cinematic freeze‑frame—soft‑focus, hushed—while close inspection reveals translucent layers, fine scumbles and feathered contours that soften outline into atmosphere. 

The painting continues Lancaster’s project of translating pre‑digital cinematic stills into slowly accrued pictorial objects. By isolating a passing shot and amplifying its chromatic temperature, she turns a throwaway frame into a site of suspended affect: sensual and quietly uncanny rather than narratively explicit. Cropping, colour and veiled facture operate together to produce a temporal ambiguity—memory, analogue noise and the afterimage of VHS light—so that the work negotiates between photoreferential painting and painterly sensuality. Shown in the context of 

 also stages a comparative logic about tempo and method: where quick alla‑prima gestures might make presence urgent, Lancaster’s glazing insists on duration, making feeling itself a technical strategy and the pictorial surface a repository for cinematic residue.

A painting by Laura Lancaster of a figure stoof in a body of water next to a red canoe

Exhibition Feature Image

An installation view of Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster's exhibition at Baltic

Rachel Lancaster

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Rachel Lancaster

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