Artist
ROSALIND LYONS
As a figurative painter since 1990, I have exhibited regularly in both mixed and solo shows, with work in UK and international private collections.
I have long been fascinated by the past; my paintings are strongly indebted to the Renaissance art of Italy and Northern Europe, Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits and influenced, more recently, by Shakespeare’s plays.
My practice involves the creation of an interdisciplinary dialogue, where the visual and the verbal intertwine and overlap. Ideas and thoughts meander and drift; there is a strong sense of the presence of the past, the inherent ambiguity of Shakespeare’s plays and characters, the visual allusions to the Renaissance and Elizabethan England, to boy players playing girls playing boys, to the intricacies and extravagance of costume or the ethereal shimmer of candlelight on a white-painted face. It is the interweaving of silent words – what Harold Pinter called the ‘language locked beneath’ - and visual quotation, of echoes, of ghosts, of shadows, of something sensed rather than known – ‘that is, and is not’ (Twelfth Night V,i,213), the transience of performance and the illusory elusiveness of real and imagined memory.
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Selected exhibitions
2025 The Lineaments of Nature; exhibition at the Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
2024 Summer Exhibition of Gallery Artists, Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
2023 Christmas Exhibition of Gallery Artists, Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
Summer Exhibition of Gallery Artists, Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
Paintings shown regularly at the Red Dot Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.
2022 Shadows, Counterfeits & Familiars; solo exhibition at the Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
2021 Christmas Exhibition of Gallery Artists, Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
2019 An Insubstantial Pageant; solo exhibition at Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire.
Summer Exhibition, Imagine Gallery, Long Melford, Suffolk.
Sense of Place; exhibition by selected artists, Red Dot Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.
Spring Exhibition, Imagine Gallery, Long Melford, Suffolk.
2018 Christmas Exhibition of Gallery Artists, Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
Summer Exhibition of Gallery Artists, Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
Paintings shown regularly at the Red Dot Gallery, Holt, and Imagine Gallery, Long Melford.
2017 Christmas Exhibition of Gallery Artists, Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold.
Paintings shown regularly at the Red Dot Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.
2016 Fragments, Scraps, Bits and Relics; Solo exhibition at Robert Phillips Gallery,
Riverhouse Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.
2012 – 2015 Paintings shown regularly at the Red Dot Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.
2012 Within this Wooden O; solo exhibition at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Bankside, London.
Series of paintings developed from residency at the theatre.
2010 Shadows of Shakespeare; solo exhibition in the Long Gallery, Blickling Hall, Norfolk.
2009 Solo exhibition at Red Dot Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.
One Step Beyond; exhibition of work by MA Fine Art graduates, Derby Museum and Art Gallery.
2007 Five Figurative Artists; Red Dot Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.
2003 Solo exhibition at Cambridge Contemporary Art.
2001-2 Work exhibited at Cambridge Contemporary Art; Rowley Fine Art Gallery, London;
Chelsea Art Fair; Affordable Art Fair, London.
2000 Solo exhibition at Cambridge Contemporary Art; Affordable Art Fair, London.
1998 Solo exhibition at Cambridge Contemporary Art.
Qualifications
2017 PhD, Anglia Ruskin University.
'Representing ambiguity: liminality and transformation in Shakespearean theatre'.
2008 MA Fine Art, De Montfort University.
2007 PGCE/PCE, Anglia Ruskin University.
1990 BA(Hons) Fine Art, Leeds University
A Midwinter Night's Dream, 2013
A Most Rare Boy, 2018