Lisa Scrimgeour

Artist Statement

My work is made up of large scale, figurative oil paintings. The portraits I paint feature faces smeared with viscous materials or clown-like pigments and dripping slimes. My figures are isolated, sad, and contaminated by the liquids that pour down their faces. For my latest paintings, I combined soft feminine colours like sickly sweet pinks, juxtaposed with sombre expression, dark eyes, clownish make-up and white, brown, or green liquid pouring down the face.

I am inspired by the deliberately shocking performance art of the Vienna actionists, Franco B and Paul McCarthy. However I enjoy the medium of painting over performance because oil painting holds a certain value in our culture - it carries the weight of art history. We paint our Kings and Queen’s, our important persons. And now I paint as Paul McCarthy performs, with irreverent humour. Do you laugh or cry? The paintings nod to the idea of the sad clown, a paradoxical character who uses humour to disguise depression and anxiety. Irreverent humour is often used to disguise or address an inner turmoil or hopelessness and that is very much what inspires me - we are all clowns in one way or another.

I keep a balance between the disturbing and the beautiful because only together can you create confusion. We see something we can’t understand or relate to and we are repelled by it but I celebrate it in paint. Painting as contemporary art form has been called ‘trifling decor’ and ‘sentimental’ and I really enjoy that as a concept. My work is about playing the clown, the jokester, but only I am in on the joke, and using a medium thought of as sentimental is really quite humorous to me.