| 'Urbanbird' is Wayne Lucas' first one-man show at James Colman Gallery. It reveals the artist's fertile, exuberant and singularly original imagination, a playful, unpredictable and, at times, quite explosive use of line and colour, as well as a challengingly exploratory use of materials. The latter include canvases covered with extensive ‘wired’ nests of bent and twisting coloured drinking straws, fake birds, and elsewhere, as Lucas himself says, 'flowers, berries, fruits, sequins and beads - all brightly coloured, seductive references to nature – applied directly to the canvas, as if they were paint.'
Wayne Lucas was born in 1965, and studied at Bath College of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art, Hornsey School of Art, and L’Ecole De Beaux Arts, Poitiers, France. He first made his name as a robust, at times delicate but always excitingly unpremeditated draughtsman, and as the painter of sparkling, monochrome canvases. In Lucas's latest work, however, there is, as he says, 'an explosion of colour'. Some are two-dimensional drawings and paintings which, in every other respect, are highly unconventional. They contain riots of what the artist describes as 'scribbles, doodles, tracks, roads, etc., exploding into mad activity', a bizarre concatenation of mark-making which is endlessly underscored and worked over with at once enchanting and disorientating results.
His large work, 'Urbanbird', is a joyous phantasmagoria, challenging any conventionally tasteful or romantic notions about birdsong and nature that we may hold. The picture has been 'drawn' with wire fed through hundreds of drinking straws – creating what the artist calls 'an instant line, with which to draw'. He likens the resulting linear dance to the appearance of birds 'midway through their nest-building'. The work's lively calligraphy, as well as the startling surface patches of green and pink, seem to evoke and celebrate the notation and vibrancy of birdsong itself.
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