ABOUT
Lesley Cox is a Visual Artist living and working in Clonakilty West Cork
Originally from Dublin, Lesley and her family moved to Rossmore, Clonakilty in 2007. Lesley’s passion is painting in oils and her inspirations are the beautiful rural and coastal landscapes that surround her, capturing the particular Irish light and tones is her ultimate goal.
Lesley’s work explores themes of containment, secrecy and memory. She uses a variety of medium including drawing, painting, sculpture and photography. Media is chosen to articulate subjects such as loss of control, memory, fragility and transience. Her painting process of layering and scraping back, allows for close observation and intimate studies of texture, light and colour but particularly of tones and values which represent her surroundings and mood.
Representations of self are of interest to her and her work has been informed by personal experience, her environment and passion for interpreting both the human form and an ever-changing landscape and self-scape. Lesley’s work has been exhibited extensively nationwide and is held in private collections both in Ireland and internationally.
Lesley has a BA in Visual Art from DIT, Sherkin Island and an MA in Art and Process from Crawford College of Art and Design.
Current Landscape Series
This series of oil landscapes were completed during lockdown and are inspired by road trips around Lesley's immediate locale with her youngest son, Peter.
During these 5km and later 20km drives, Peter took photographs which Lesley then used as research for oil landscape paintings. The trips were a fantastic opportunity to explore areas not yet travelled to and also to appreciate much more familiar views. The landscape paintings are mainly expressionist in nature being heavily influenced by personal mood and atmosphere and this is reflected in palette colour, textures and idiosyncratic painting titles, also vitally important is capturing the particular light that comes with our Irish climate.
It becomes apparent when the series is viewed as a whole, that there is little evidence of humans within the landscapes save the odd farm building, but no people are depicted, further describing the isolation felt by all of us during this difficult time.