Emily Quince

People fascinate Emily Quince. Most of her paintings are of figures but her relationship to the person being painted is crucial. She is interested in the story behind someone’s life. She tells her own story unflinchingly, her work becoming a visual diary. Recently she has been incorporating printed and scribbled text evidencing her dyslexia.

As with her paintings the words are a response to the world around her, occasionally a social comment but mostly observations. “It is about many ways of reading things, literally and visually.” The figures in Emily’s paintings are drawn from life. Her models are her children, other family members and random people sitting chatting in the pub.

Paper is Emily’s surface of choice, and she finds it much more sympathetic than canvas as a support. It also allows her to screen-print directly onto the work. She uses an eclectic range of media from oils to household paint, water-soluble crayons and gold leaf.

For Emily it is about “painting the essence of something rather than reality, because photography can do that”.

Most of her paintings focus on a single figure close up in a flattened space. It is easy to look at her palette and the immediacy of her drawing and reference the German Expressionists or Picasso. Emily herself cites Jean-Michel Basquiat but she would prefer not to be pinned down by any particular school of painting or artist. She is her own person and her own painter.