About Lesley
Lesley Croxford was born and lives in Essex, she has a studio in Space Studios, Queen Street, Colchester.
After graduating in 1981 with a First-Class Honours degree she exhibited in Kettles Yard Cambridge in a group show and while a student she exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Royal Academy Stowells exhibition twice where she won an award for printmaking. She also exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall.
She is an alumna of the Royal Drawing School and has exhibited in East Anglia, London and Germany.
I have been a figurative artist for over 40 years, working from what I see in the real world, mainly interiors, flowers and still life or a model, but I have always had a desire to work from my imagination rather than being restricted by trying to depict what I see. Recently I have been exploring the possibility of working from poetry to find a bridge between the real world and the imaginative world of a poet.
You could argue that they are just illustrations, but I am aware that in the process of painting and drawing I tap into my own imaginative shadowland and inheritance of ideas and images.
As Plath demonstrates… ’a painting can recreate, by illusion, the dimension it loses by being confined to canvas, so a poem, by its own system of illusions, can set up a rich and apparently living world within its particular limits’. Her poems include such feelings as fear and despair and barrenness as well as love, but she adds ‘these darker emotions may well put on the mask of quite unworldly things such as ghosts or trolls or antique gods.’
Within my drawings and paintings, I have attempted to make visible the images I see in my mind from the poet’s words and tried to recreate the poet’s living world of imagination on paper or canvas, absorbing within them the shadowland of their darker world of feelings, emotions and psychological states.
