Lisa Milroy

Lisa Milroy (born 1959 in Vancouver) is a Canadian painter whom now lives and works in the UK. She is known for painting everyday items in the form of rows or grids, she does this in an intimate, isolated and sometimes photographic way. She mainly paints still life. Lisa studied at Université de Paris-Sorbonne (1977 - 1978) briefly before going and staying in London where she then studied at St Martin’s School of Art (1978 - 1979). In 1979 she then studied at University of London (1979 - 1982). Her first solo exhibition, in 1984, was of small still-life paintings depicting common objects, either singly or in sets. Other works from the 1990s include landscapes, cityscapes and crowds. Crowd (1992; e.g. London, Nicola Jacobs and Tony Schlesinger priv. col.) demonstrates the artist's continued interest in the technical aspect of the painting process, with strokes, dabs, dashes, dots, planes of colour and other painterly marks layering the surface. Lisa Milroy is an artist concerned more with form in her paintings than with content. She chooses to paint everyday objects but paints them isolated from their original context, unravelling new qualities and meanings and more importantly, a new way of looking at inanimate objects. The objects in her paintings demonstrate explicitly that they are painted rather than photographed. Milroy paints them from memory instead of from direct observation.