Long & Ryle is delighted to present A Commonplace Collection of Paintings, a solo exhibition of new works by British artist Lottie Cole, opening on 3 July until 9 August 2024. In 2021, Lottie Cole was elected an Associate Member of the Royal Watercolour Society, a British Institution which selects only the finest practitioners of water-based painting.
Growing Up
We moved back to Ashdown Forest in Sussex, from the London Suburbs, where my mother grew up when I was about 10. My grandparents lived on a little farm a mile down the road from us, and my cousins similarly were close by. My maternal grandparents both came from largish families (5 & 9) so we had cousins a-plenty. My father was Irish, and his sister had three children who were a little older, but we also spent time together. We moved back to Sussex about ten years ago and now live about one mile from my childhood home. The Ashdown Forest is a very specific landscape - it’s heathland, but you can also see the Downs in the distance, and beyond that, you know the sea is very close.
I have always loved art, and though I’m not the tidiest person (in contrast to my brother), my Caran d’Ache pencils were always in colour order and kept neatly in their tin.
“Painting is a compulsion really. It’s just something I find I have to do. ”
Art was my passion at school; when I graduated, I went to Wimbledon Art School to do a Foundation course. To my surprise, I hated it and left after the first term. It was a shock that I hated it, and a mis-start right out of the gate but on reflection I think it allowed me to develop my style. I went to university, and then once working full time, I would paint at the weekends, meaning my paintings had dried during the week, and so I got lots of thin layers of paint, which is still how I paint.
As I didn’t go on to do an art degree, I’ve learned as I’ve gone along. I don’t think you can really learn to be an artist by doing anything other than creating your own work. Working in watercolour was born out of a purely practical necessity to find something less space-hungry, especially when I didn’t have my own studio. With watercolours, you can stack them up, and they take so little space compared to oils and canvas. Having started in response to a practical need I find I now like working with watercolour & gouache because it has its own life as a medium so you have to work alongside it.
Inspiration
Painting is a compulsion, really. It’s just something I find I have to do.
Painting a subject is a way of exploring and understanding it and so it’s been interesting to spend time considering that aspect of life. I also looked at old formal studio photos of children - they are so stiff, but almost always, you spot the tiniest gesture of affection - a little finger touching the end of another finger - and I found them moving. One of my favourite pictures is Mary Cassatt’s Little Girls in a Blue Armchair. The pose is so truthful and the opposite of sentimental, and I wanted to see if it’s possible to paint children and convey a sense of their complexities, but not in a mawkish way.
Poetry, like art, takes you somewhere else, it’s distilled experience and observation and storytelling. But I also find music helpful too. I did a painting inspired by listening to one of my daughter’s friend singing Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night at a school concert, and I endlessly have the Pet Shop Boys on repeat - their songs are such narratives - the two songs for Scandal they collaborated on with Dusty Springfield give you so much more than just a song.
I like imagining what it would be like to live somewhere else, to be someone else, to have different tastes and interests. And every painting is a chance to be something different
Advice
Funnily enough, I’m riddled with doubts about almost everything in my life but never about the need to paint. I’d be doing it regardless of whether it could provide a living or not. I think once you understand that you’re primarily painting for yourself and letting what interests you dictate your work, that's a freedom which makes creating things easier.
I would say consider yourself to be your own Patron. For many years when I was working full time and painting I felt that I was failing in fulfilling my desire to be a painter. But everyone needs to pay their bills and actually developing over a long period of time, meant that I could make my work without overly relying on it to pay its way only because I had that other income.
Long & Ryle Exhibition
My upcoming exhibition builds on the themes of Home of the Paleoethnobotanist, which I showed at Long & Ryle in 2022, but the balance of subject matter has altered. I’m still using interiors as a form of storytelling, but rather than highlighting lesser-known women artists and collecting in general, the work in this show is more about feelings and mood, using poems as a starting point.
I have always painted subjects beyond interiors - my first show was actually about street scenes and boats. But I think for this show, I’ve looked more at myself and my own life. Underlying it all is an interest in ‘interiority’, whether it’s looking at someone reading a book or trying to read what the contents of a room are trying to convey.
For many years I worked at The London Library, and as in so many things while I worked there, I was confronted by my general level of ignorance as I was surrounded by such clever and interesting people. I’d never heard of a Commonplace Book but it’s a scrapbook of sorts in which people kept notes of things that interested them. So they don’t have prescribed subjects that they cover. And when I was trying to explain what this collection of paintings was about, they fought back against a straight-forward description, and so I felt that the reference to the commonplace idea gave room to the different subjects.
Many forms of creativity are pretty solitary, which, in general, is what I love most about painting, but being accepted into a community of artists has been great. I like the fact that the RWS wants to celebrate a spectrum of artists using a water-based medium—so you’ve got completely abstract artists to hyperrealistic artists—and it’s all welcome under the same umbrella.
