ArtistsNetwork.com 31Meet the Artist
English artist Lucy Willis
(lucywillis.com) studied
at the Ruskin School of
Drawing and Fine Art, in
Oxford, England, and then
taught drawing and etching
at the Aegean School of
Fine Art, in Greece. A painter
and printmaker, Willis has
shown her work in more
than 27 solo exhibitions in
London to date. Her work
has won several awards,
including a 1992 BP Portrait
Award, and is part of many
public collections, including
the National Portrait
Gallery, in London, and in
private collections around
the world. Willis has run
numerous painting trips
abroad as a guest tutor
for the U.K. magazine The
Artist. Her home base is
Somerset, England.Turn for a demo
Notice how the shadows in Th e Greenhouse and Peppers, England conform to
the same laws of perspective as everything else in the picture: All the receding
horizontal lines that are parallel—whether glazing bars, shelves, fl ower bed
edges or window frame—meet at a vanishing point somewhere in the center
of the picture, level with my eyeline. Th e shadows on the wall also represent
horizontal lines, projected by the glazing bars opposite, so they become
narrower as they recede; they, too, meet at the same vanishing point.
SEEING THE WORLD IN A NEW LIGHT
One intriguing aspect of shadows—particularly those cast by strong sunlight—
is that they impose striking patterns onto our familiar world. It seems that our
brains have evolved to deal with this phenomenon, and we think nothing of it. It’s
only when we set out to paint the eff ect that light has on our surroundings that
we realize how extreme and complicated the changes are that occur when the sun
comes out. Analyzing these changes and making visual order out of the apparent
chaos of shadows can be a delightful challenge.
This article has been extracted
from Sunlight & Shadows in
Watercolour by Lucy Willis,
published by Batsford.