Artist

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In Episode 54 of Metralla Rosa, Carla is in London, talking to Rosalind Lyons, an artist whose work is inspired primarily by the Elizabethan and Shakespearean period.

Rosalind has a successful career as an illustrator of children’s stories and academic publications, but it is her devotion to her Renaissance inspired figurative paintings that has, since the 1990s, led to regular exhibitions, winning her accolades from both galleries and the general public from, not only her native United Kingdom but also, around the world. The characters and their universes, created by Rosalind with her meticulous adornment and impeccable attention to detail, are treated with a style that appears to reside halfway between past and present, innovation and tradition, the obvious and the obliquely referential and the disturbingly and culturally unprecedented.

Rosalind’s portraits offer a fascinatingly unique and perfectly personal encounter, in which the weight of history is made light of and, in which the memories of a literary and historical past are intertwined with the painted gesture, giving rise to not only a revision of traditions but also experimentation. By combining legacy and innovation, imagination and reality and classical visions and futuristic visions, Rosalyn gives the viewer of her paintings the space in which to experience an alternative truth, that is subject to neither time or an expiration date. With a style that is strongly influenced and inspired by the aesthetics of Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture and 16th century Northern Europe style, her work also reflects the theatrical traditions of William Shakespeare. Together – and individually – it offers a window to a reality full of characters, who, despite their unique individuality, resonate deeply with their universal archetypes.

During this interview you will come to understand how a graphic artist, with extensive experience in the world of publishing, found herself being kidnapped by the anachronistic and timeless meticulousness of the fine arts. You will discover how the exquisite ambiguity present within her work allows you to travel to other times, inviting you to be seduced by the mystery of an unknown, which is, at same time, deliciously familiar. Rosalind also tells us, ahead of her solo exhibition, ‘Shadows, Counterfeits & Familiars’ – held in October 2022 at the Fosse Gallery – about her working methods during the build up to showing her work, why literature is so closely linked to her creative process, how her fascination with Elizabethan theatrical lavishness led her to be the artist-in-residence at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London and how her work has come to be a bridge between the exquisitely anonymous and the inexorably public.

And now, enjoy the interview!

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