SD - LR — Parallel Form

THE SIT DOWN
09: LUCY ROBSON

For someone who has been painting for four years, Lucy Robson’s (b. 1993) trajectory feels less like a beginning and more like a return. Although she moves through paint as though it were long familiar territory, the pivot followed a decade spent elsewhere: photography at UCT in Cape Town, a women’s swimwear start-up, fashion, and eventually a corporate career as a childrenswear buyer. Bows, occasion dresses, fabric, texture — the language of girlhood was always present, even when painting was not.

The return came quietly. In 2022, after nearly ten years away from paint, working from an image on her phone, Lucy painted a portrait of her nephew, using oil paint for the first time, and something shifted. The medium felt alive: resistant yet transformative. Within a year, she enrolled on the MFA at Goldsmiths, committing fully to painting.

Goldsmiths offered time, solitude, and critical pressure. Initially, there was resistance to the hyper-feminine imagery she was producing: siren-like figures (women depicted with a magnetic allure), archetypal women, overt romance. Questions arose around whether this mode of femininity felt regressive or disenfranchised. Lucy remained firm; for her, girlhood is a language — nostalgic, seductive, and deeply familiar — but also complex. Her work doesn’t glorify romantic fantasy; it probes its contradictions. The hopefulness, the self-betrayal, the disillusionment that follows longing.

Her paintings are auto-fictional. Drawing from her own experiences of dating, faith, shame, and desire, Lucy constructs cinematic, hyperbolic scenes that sit between confession and myth. Romance in her work is both ecstatic and fatalistic, and the beauty is deliberate. Raised Catholic, she remains enamoured with the surface drama of the Rococo — its theatricality, and its holiness. Beauty, for her, is not naive, but a vehicle.

Her background in photography and fashion remains foundational. The works are staged, composed, often drawn from photographs she takes herself. She works slowly, allowing paintings to sit in the studio for months, revisiting and revising. Where her natural mark is loose and gestural, Goldsmiths sharpened her hand; now she seeks a balance — painterly, but controlled. Increasingly, she is focused on celebrating paint itself: saturated colour, tactile surface, the temporal weight embedded in the canvas.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths, Lucy has had a debut solo exhibition at PM/AM in London, and has recently exhibited with Southern Guild at Investec Cape Town ahead of a solo coming up there later this year.

Her practice continues to examine the agony and ecstasy of love from a distinctly female perspective — slow, saturated, and unapologetically romantic.