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The popular colourist and contemporary painter Lucy Doyle has been painting and exhibiting her work successfully in Ireland, continually evolving and developing her unique figurative oil painting style, since completing her painting degree at Sheffield Art College back in 1982. As David Britton from Adams and former owner and director of The Fredericks Gallery, said, when he opened her solo show in 2007, ‘ No one is painting like Lucy in Ireland; she is a one-off and has an utterly unique and instantly identifiable style of her own’.
Lucy’s subject matter is predominately still life and interiors, often incorporating figurative elements within this genre. She has a more expressive rather than local use of colour, and uses this to charge her work with emotion and energy. Her experimental and explorative use of colour constantly challenges and engages the viewer to participate fully when reading her paintings. However, as Pat Kenny described when opening her solo show Alizarin in 2006, ‘her paintings impart an overall sense of coolness and calmness despite her energetic and unapologetic use of strong pure colour and the vitality of her paint marks’.
Her continued use of observed painting from life provides the viewer with further intricacies and complexities that lifts her work onto another level of picture making and visual engagement. Lucy creates her lively paintings using a palette knife, this enables her to maximize the full intensity of the colour and texture of oil paint, often mixing and merging her colours on the canvas as she works, wet on wet. Lucy is a very productive painter with regular solo shows since having her first solo show in Waterford’s Garter Lane Art Centre in 1986. As a result she has become a very popular and much loved Irish painter, and her work is in many private and public collections throughout Ireland, UK, and abroad.
“Her paintings have a hypnotic yet invigorating quality. You look at them and you can’t help but smile, they are like comfort food for the eyes.” Sarah Webb
“Decorative works with a great feeling for pattern and colour” Aidan Dunne, Irish Times
“Extraordinary capacity for acute observation” Paolo Tullio
