Degree: MFA
University: Duncan of Jordanstone
Graduation Year: 2013
Lisa Scrimgeour homes in on the most expressive features of human vulnerability. Eyes, noses, mouths – each conveying our innermost thoughts and feelings. The canvas becomes a showcase of human emotion, Scrimgeour balancing realism and a juxtaposition of colours that nod to the sweetened and sanitised false fronts we may sometimes put on. Pastels and pinks merge gleefully with both ruddy browns and luxuriant honey golds. Textures and solvents smudge down faces like old clown paint, with the subjects’ jaded faces lying somewhere in between. The resulting images create something bold and unsettling, reminiscent of a long day at the circus – including the sugar-highs, nausea and excitement that come along with it.
Scrimgeour has many works held in public collections across Dundee, Scotland, and has been spotlighted in the Guardian and Elle Decoration as an ‘Artist to Invest In’. Based in Perth, Scrimgeour has a distinctive style: part delightful, part devilish, and always intriguing.
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.
(2021) Perth Open Studios, WASPS Creative Exchange, Perth
(2017) Women in the Arts, The Byre, St Andrews
(2015) How the Light Gets In, Institute of Ideas, Hay on Wye, London
(2014) Trans / Send, Holtzman MFA Gallery, Maryland, U.S
(2013) The SAY Awards, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
(2013) Annual Research and Scholarship Conference, The Dalhousie, Dundee University, Dundee
(2013) Duncan of Jordanstone Masters Show, Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee
(2012) Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show, Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee
(2011) Duncan of Jordanstone Group Show, Pittenweem Art Festival, Pittenweem, Fife
(2010) Visualise, DUSA, Dundee
(2013) Scottish Album of the Year: Art Commission
(2012) Sandra McNeilance Memorial Prize for Drawing and Painting