New Paintings by Emma Lilly

Emma Lilly’s paintings are an exploration of the compulsive and intuitive act of doodling underpinned by an eclectic, personal borrowing of motifs and styles from art history and popular culture.

“I am an obsessive doodler,” she says, “endlessly drawing abstract shapes, twirls and conjunctions that follow their own logic. I began to wonder about the relationship between the way they might push my painting in a direction that felt uniquely mine. I wanted to expand the points of reference while retaining the semi-conscious, personal, free, playful nature of doodling to see where that combination would take my painting.

Could a Sol Lewitt wall drawing, an Ab-Ex squiggle, a Persian pattern, an architectural element laid over a constructivist spatial arrangement make a puzzling sort of sense? Could I twist and layer and assemble this clutter into a momentarily coherent coming together? Could I persuade these elements to co-exist? This disruptive process reflects a desire to balance intuition and control. These possibilities act not only as my response to the visual cacophony of contemporary life, but also challenge me, and hopefully the viewer, to consider what a painting can be.”

Emma Lilly is an abstract painter who studied at Central St Martin’s School of Art and lives and works in Hackney, London.