Muse Magazine - March 2009
On 18th March London's Belgravia Gallery sees the opening of the latest show of recent work by Trish Wylie, whose iconic painting of Clint Eastwood graced the front cover of Muse April 06.
Trish's work, with her individual approach and style, has great appeal. Based in Bridport, Dorset, she creates large oil on canvas paintings of scenes from iconic Western movies such as The Magnificent Seven and For A Few Dollars More. She has developed a system of painting from movie projection stills, which also allows the final canvases to adhere to cinema screen ratios, which is a process unique to her.
Watching a Western one day she decided to try and paint a scene by freezing a scene on the projector and painting it on a large canvas. It worked and she continued to create more and more from titles such as Escape from Monument Valley and the Chase. Huge portraits of Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen riding alongside Yul Brynner in the Magnificent Seven are emblematic of her work, which stands as a fusion of art and film.
We caught up with Trish and asked her about being an artist exhibiting in London yet based outside the capital.
"I have read recently that artists working outside London are at a disadvantage" she said. " Admittedly you don't have the stimulus of London, the metropolis, but you also don't have the distractions; or the intense competition and sense of desperation that can sometimes engender. On a purely pragmatic level, studio space is better - in terms of choice and economics - outside London."
Trish, then, seems to have the best of both worlds. Her studio, a huge draughty loft overlooking West Bay, enables her to work without the aforementioned distractions, while, from a commercial point of view, the Belgravia gallery is a brilliant shop window for her work.
The show will be opened by Sir Christopher Frayling, himself a great admirer of Serge Leone's work. He has written more then a dozen books on arts and culture and is particularly known for his study of spaghetti westerns. He has shown a keen interest in Trish's work ever since he first saw it.
www.trishwyliepainter.com
Belgravia Gallery, 45 Albemarle Street
London WI
16th March - 9th April 2009 at
www.belgraviagallery.com
