Lorna Sinclair grew up in an art lover’s home, where creativity was encouraged and artistic expression was celebrated
I have always been enchanted by colour and was drawn to painting from a very young age. One of the first paintings that stood out to me as a teenager was by Joan Eardley.
I remember being hypnotised by her expressive landscapes and portraits of children in the Gorbals in Glasgow. She blended colourist techniques with texture to achieve a true rawness that I’d never seen before – and haven’t seen since. It was there, gazing at Joan Eardley’s work in the National Gallery of Scotland, that I decided I wanted to be an artist.
I graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2017 and I don’t think I’ve gone longer than four days without painting since. I’ve completed residencies across the UK and in Cyprus and Berlin. My work was on show at Edinburgh’s Morningside Gallery earlier this year and in January I’ll be in Costa Rica, painting from an eco house near the rainforest.
My work exists around the sensory memories of my travels to faraway dreamscapes, as well as scenes from my everyday life. Seemingly unexciting things such as cycling through Glasgow Green on a sunny day can inspire me just as much as my adventures to the Outer Hebrides and further afield to places like Byron Bay, Australia.
This painting, Summer Flowers, was part of the summer exhibition at Morningside Gallery and is still available there now. The piece has been a source of inspiration for a lot of my work.
I was inspired to paint Summer Flowers from spontaneous sketches of various window scenes, with wild garden flowers spilling out of a cerulean vase, during a warm summer’s day in the Borders. The brilliant contrast of the red flowers that were glowing in the sunlight, against the cooler tones of the window interior attracted me to paint this scene – to capture this fleeting moment of intense light.
Thicker, impasto brushstrokes of oil paint mixed with pigment were layered to create rich textures in the flowers, which is contrasted with washes of dribbling, thinned paint to create a sense of calm and ease in the background – somewhere to escape into. Blending saturated colour with these textural elements, I feel, adds a physicality to my paintings, giving them life beyond the canvas.
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