First place (tree study) - Alice Watkins

Alice Watkins (1996) studied fine art painting (BFA) at the City & Guilds of London Art School 2016 - 2019. Today, she works in Leicester, England. Alice paints from found imagery from the mid - to late twentieth century. By concentrating on dated imagery with a retrospective aesthetic and content, her work is inherently and knowingly nostalgic. Other stylistic references include turn-of-the-century figurative paintings, personal history and local or contemporary vernacular. Her latest compositions are often dreamlike and expressive and they adopt a haptic and responsive relationship with paint.

Initially working directly on top of the source material, Alice then construct an entirely new image using oil paint, working and re-working until the paintings emerge and develop their own particularity. With no preconceived notion of a final composition; she relies on a series of intuitive decisions. Lines and shapes are defined, buried and then rediscovered, so that the final image bears the visible history of the evolution of shapes and illusory spaces beneath. This appropriation, subversion and repetition encourages a deliberate tension between materiality and subject.

Alice’s most recent paintings aim to create work that resonates with a certain nostalgia for the past female experience – spanning ancient, through to the mid twentieth century to the 1980s. Her paintings reveal the absurdity, joy, melancholy, lightness and darkness within the female experience, often through personal and family history. Using personal ancestry, collective histories, traditions and loss. The figure of the heroine resurfaces and is collectively questioned across her oeuvres.