Wasps artists’ studios

Audrey Grant is a painter working mainly in oils. Her work explores the human figure and the painted surface. The act of painting is an emotional and physical process for her whereby paint is layered on over a period of time, then scraped back and added to again to create a ‘working surface’ from which a figure begins to emerge. The paint is applied with brushes, palette knives, rags and her hands, as though she is trying to uncover or excavate something. She often scratches or scores marks, words, phrases and even mathematical equations into her canvases.

Grant’s figures are mainly solitary and grow out of a dialogue with the paint. They are invented and imagined, not specific to an individual and often reflect a man or a woman in the act of moving or stillness. Her most recent collections have been inspired by the writings of German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1858 – 1938), observing dancers in rehearsal at Scottish Ballet and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). More recently she expanded into a creative exploration of Scottish sea and landscape using mixed media techniques on art photographs.

Audrey Grant exhibits regularly with Panter and Hall, London and her most recent solo exhibition of new paintings The Lifeworld took place in September 2016 and will show with them again in 2018. She has had work selected for the prestigious Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions in 2016 and 2017 and regularly has work selected for the Royal Scottish Academy Open and the Visual Arts Scotland Open Exhibitions.

A review of the 2015 Visual Arts Scotland Open described the exhibition as having, ‘…some of Scotland’s finest painters including Kate Downie, Barbara Rae, Audrey Grant and Joyce Gunn Cairns’ (Jan Patience, The Herald, 2015). In 2016 Duncan MacMillan called Grant, ‘a talent to watch’ in his Scotsman review of her solo exhibition With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open at the Union Gallery during the Edinburgh Festival.

She was awarded the Open Eye Gallery Exhibition Award at the Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibition in 2015 and Ceci est mon corps took place at the gallery in May 2017. This work arose from the artist’s collaboration with Scottish Ballet in rehearsal at their studios in Tramway, Glasgow. This exhibition was chosen as Critic’s Choice by Duncan Macmillan in the Scotsman where he described Grant as an ‘outstanding painter’. A selection of the ‘Ceci est mon corps’ paintings was shown at Panter and Hall, London in October 2017.

Grant is a professional member of Visual Arts Scotland. She is based at WASPS artist studios, Patriothall, Edinburgh.