Lauren Mycroft

Lauren Mycroft is an abstract painter who graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2008. Lauren exhibits her work regularly on the west coast and her paintings reside in private collections all over North America, Asia and Europe. Lauren works out of her home studio on Vancouver Island where she lives with her partner and two children.

Each piece in Mycroft’s body of work chronicles a search for equilibrium. Her striving to balance value, composition, and colour achieves the depth and richness of her paintings: their sense of harmony.

Mycroft begins with a colour palette that is both crafted and intuited. She selects and mixes it with precision, though its tones are collected through a largely subconscious reading of our environment. She immerses herself in the water-saturated colours of the Pacific Northwest’s coastal trees, fields, rocks and ocean, which form her palette. However, it is not their literal forms but their chromatic features and refractions of light that lend her work its distinct abstraction and movement. Memories of place form a starting point, but Mycroft is committed to an abstraction that allows expression of forms, tones, and hues in themselves. Bands of colour converge, as her play with different levels of transparencies achieves the illusion of depth and hue revealing new tones in their unification.

Mycroft’s process is based in the concept of flux. While we commonly use this word as ‘change’, its literal meaning is ‘flow’. After establishing her colour field, Mycroft pours water-thinned acrylic paint onto clear primed raw canvas, creating stains of varying opacities. This is the moment where the nature of the medium literally merges with the artist’s practice; Mycroft must at once respond to and guide the flow of the water onto the canvas. Lifting, tilting, asserting, and yielding all fill the brief space between the water’s contact and its settling. While the throughline of Mycroft’s works reflects the consistency of her process, the viscosity and volume of diluted paint are unique each time, calling the artist to respond with immediacy to the unexpected dynamics at play across the canvas.

The effects of Mycroft’s unique approach re-enact the play of light and colour evident throughout our living surroundings. Washes of overlapping transparencies and intersections of colour create new and exciting hues. There are pops of opacity and unexpected colours vividly reminiscent of those we see in the flux of water through our oceans and rivers. The intersections and disruptions of colour along the canvas are kindred to those along our coast.