A dip in my 'archives'

From time to time I feel the need of a private viewing - a bit of individual nourishment using collected reproductions of an artist's work while situated within my own workspace. One topic I've been loosely pondering recently is repetition, and the other day my mind strayed towards the paintings of Sonia Lawson. At the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition shows she is entitled to include the usual Royal Academician's quota (I cannot remember off hand how many that is - six?), and every year I enjoy seeing her work.

As can be seen in the links, including this one for the Boundary Gallery in London, she not only deals with repetition, but also does a nice line in powerfully brooding women. They conjure characters from novels: elusive yet magnetic, universal but unknowable - wondrous stuff.

I immediately took to her work because she seemed to be one of those artists who could see inside my head (another of those is Alice Kettle - see the link at the side of this blog). This may sound arrogant, but what I mean is that this was a language that I recognised - not that I immediately wanted to copy what she has done. I had been doodling repetitions in a generally similar way for some time,

and I also am very drawn to such enigmatic females. It is a tremendous reassurance and encouragement to find such an artist whose work I admire. I love the surfaces of her paintings too, carved and scratched into like work on a wall, rough and looking as if it has been around since Roman times.

I have a folder of catalogues and postcards of her work, and one of my favourites is the postcard from the 1993 RA Summer Exhibition reproduced above: Three Seated Women charcoal and watercolour 81 x 108.5cm. Looking through her work again has given me just the boost I needed in my vaguely sagging self confidence (which it does from time to time).