Lucile
Haefflinger.

Lucile paints from observation, and only from observation. Her studio is the kind of room where a friend comes over to draw and ends up being drawn: "Leo" is a portrait of a fellow artist who arrived to paint her and was painted back, and she says she found it more interesting when he moved as he pleased, because likeness lives in movement rather than stillness. Her materials are direct and unfussy, oil paint, oil pastel and compressed charcoal worked onto wood panel, and she is candid that her main goal while painting is simply to get the likeness, to catch the exact curve of a cheek. Painting people, she says, is her way of learning about them. She does not claim the work represents emerging British artists in general; she claims it represents what mattered to her at that instant, which is the only honest claim a portrait can make.