Lucy Dickens: The way she sees it
05/19/21 • 36 min
See pictures and read more on materiallyspeaking.com
Lucy Dickens is an artist and illustrator, whose works exudes humour. Close friends since the age of three, Lucy and Sarah ramble and percolate over Lucy’s upcoming show.
As a great, great granddaughter of writer Charles Dickens, writing plays an important part in Lucy’s life. Her paintings often have a narrative quality, leaving you wondering what went before, or what will happen next. As well as humour, her recent work contains a lot of vibrant colour and exuberance.
After school Lucy studied fashion journalism and started as a stylist at Condé Nast, where she soon became fashion editor of Brides magazine. Her passion for materials, and how people express themselves through fashion, continues to this day. When she started her own family she began writing and illustrating childrens’ books which were published in London and New York.
This May she has a show at Cricket Fine Art and as the catalogue arrived she and Sarah flick through it with Lucy explaining the background behind the pictures. She says she likes to portray groups of people and works in many mediums from oils, acrylics and gouaches, to bold graphic fabric collages. The series of Japanese paintings reflect her love of travel.
Lucy often puts in a cameo appearance in her own work. A self-portrait below shows her framed within a picture At the Picasso Museum and again in Cyclists and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner where you can she her as a passenger peeping out of the back of a bus, centre left of painting.
A great observer of people, lover of dogs and fan of London, Cyclist and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner speaks of Lucy’s skill to snatch a view from a bus and make it immortal.
Lucy comes from a creative family. Her mother Julia Dickens paints, while her sister Sophie Dickens is a renowned sculptor whose work you can see at Sladmore Contemporary Gallery, or on her website: sophiedickens.co.uk.
See pictures and read more on materiallyspeaking.com
Lucy Dickens is an artist and illustrator, whose works exudes humour. Close friends since the age of three, Lucy and Sarah ramble and percolate over Lucy’s upcoming show.
As a great, great granddaughter of writer Charles Dickens, writing plays an important part in Lucy’s life. Her paintings often have a narrative quality, leaving you wondering what went before, or what will happen next. As well as humour, her recent work contains a lot of vibrant colour and exuberance.
After school Lucy studied fashion journalism and started as a stylist at Condé Nast, where she soon became fashion editor of Brides magazine. Her passion for materials, and how people express themselves through fashion, continues to this day. When she started her own family she began writing and illustrating childrens’ books which were published in London and New York.
This May she has a show at Cricket Fine Art and as the catalogue arrived she and Sarah flick through it with Lucy explaining the background behind the pictures. She says she likes to portray groups of people and works in many mediums from oils, acrylics and gouaches, to bold graphic fabric collages. The series of Japanese paintings reflect her love of travel.
Lucy often puts in a cameo appearance in her own work. A self-portrait below shows her framed within a picture At the Picasso Museum and again in Cyclists and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner where you can she her as a passenger peeping out of the back of a bus, centre left of painting.
A great observer of people, lover of dogs and fan of London, Cyclist and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner speaks of Lucy’s skill to snatch a view from a bus and make it immortal.
Lucy comes from a creative family. Her mother Julia Dickens paints, while her sister Sophie Dickens is a renowned sculptor whose work you can see at Sladmore Contemporary Gallery, or on her website: sophiedickens.co.uk.
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Back again: Series 2
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Welcome back to a second series of Materially Speaking – where artists and artisans tell us their stories through the materials they choose.
In these snapshot stories, they tell us about their journey to become an artist, and the inspirations for their work. Along the way, they explain why they have chosen different materials to work with at different stages of their careers.
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Emmanuel Fillion: The art of cutting stone
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Born in Soissons, France, Emmanuel went to trade school at the age of 16 to learn how to renovate historical monuments by hand, specialising in granite. He spent some years restoring churches, cathedrals and monuments all over France until he felt the calling to create his own work as an artist.
He says women and the female form are a constant source of inspiration. Dance is a strong theme in his work and began with a homage he did for Martha Graham which lives in the outdoor sculpture garden at the Wallis Theatre in Beverly Hills, LA. The models he used from a French dance school in order to make that sculpture impressed him hugely and, he says, gave him a lifetime of inspiration, adding that he felt he was surrounded by walking sculptures.
For a recent show Emmanuel made a triptych of Exaltation – one carved in white marble, another cast in polished white bronze, and the third in natural bronze with a patina. He explains how he wanted to illustrate how the same subject feels completely different when created in a different material.
Emmanuel displays his extraordinary carving skills in his portrayals of Kinbaku – the Japanese art of tying rope around a person using visually intricate patterns, typically with several pieces of thin rope (often jute, hemp or linen). He believes the practice is empowering because the people are not tied in their mind, in fact they are very free.
While Emmanuel was carving in white, bianco p and statuario marble, some of his black women friends asked why he didn’t sculpt black women. He says, ‘I felt like, well, I’m not going to sculpt a black woman in white marble. It kind of doesn’t make sense because part of their beauty is their colour. I mean, it’s not a colour, but it’s being black. So I went to a quarry in Belgium and purchased some beautiful black marble blocks. And it’s really an homage to them. And I hope they’re happy, but I think a lot of them, they express their contentment.’
Emmanuel describes how he was affected by the fires in California and the south of France. He admires the resilience of nature whereby a forest is reborn afterwards, growing back twice as beautiful. It was then that he started to make pieces with burnt wood.
Emmanuel comes from a family with a famous painter, Jean Cousin the Elder. Cousin was a Renaissance painter who painted Eva prima Pandora in 1500, which is in the Louvre, Paris.
Emmanuel and I met at Massimo Galleni Studios, who specialise in reproducing classical sculptures, just outside Pietrasanta. He also referred to Mario Tavarelli who showed Emmanuel around when he first arrived in Carrara in 1995. Mario was the owner of a marble company and had guided the novelist Irving Stone during his research for his book on Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy.
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