LIL TUDOR-CRAIG

For her first exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery Lil Tudor-Craig (born Suffolk, 1960) is showing a series of some twenty paintings of plants and the wildlife these sustain closely observed on the East Anglian coast, an undertaking which has consumed all her energies for the better part of the last five years. Trained formally in farming and wildlife conservation, Tudor-Craig has been committed to painting since the early 1980s. She paints with an agenda: to show those modest plant species native to the British Isles which grow wild and tend in the obsessive pursuit of tidiness to be dismissed contemptuously as 'weeds', but which in reality provide nourishment as well as refuge for our wildlife. 'Many insects,' Tudor-Craig reminds us, 'depend on a single plant species. Without the caterpillar's food plant, there will be no butterflies. Brambles and stinging nettles especially support large numbers of butterflies and other creatures, some of which live only on these plants. In my paintings I seek to represent these relationships, this inter-connectedness.'

To realise her objective and to bring the viewer closer to 'the natural world on our very doorstep, which sometimes is not obviously beautiful, but which holds delights, magic and importance and can be greatly healing for us,' Tudor-Craig has developed and honed her distinctive approach. She fleshes out her core subjects, be it nettles, reeds or hogweed, in sympathetic detail to give each composition its structure, providing a moody evocation of water/sky as background. In the foreground, in contrast, the various species of birds, butterflies and other insects appear in a stylised and highly precise form, so that no aspect of their plumage or markings goes unrecorded, a reminder that in the 1990s the artist spent some years as an instructor in wild plant identification. Together these two approaches coalesce to provide compositions as graceful as they are informative, sharing some of the qualities of a Chinese screen or scroll painting, or it may be the harmonious interweaving of finely observed plants and wildlife characteristic of Roman domestic frescoes such as those from the Villa of Livia Drusilla in Rome. In these delicate works in tempera on gesso, respectful as they are of truth to nature, there is a lively, poetic dimension which brings to mind certain exquisite Persian miniatures from the Safavid era. While no more precise subject could be imagined, these are paintings in which, as is characteristic of Thoreau's observations in Walden or some of Richard Jefferies' writings on wildlife, a sense of the universal perceived in the particular prevails and gives such impact, such a sense of caring to these deceptively simple nature studies.

BIOGRAPHY

Lil Tudor-Craig was born in Suffolk in 1960 and brought up among artists and writers, her father being a museum curator, and her mother the distinguished art historian Lady Pamela Wedgwood. Friends from childhood included Judith and Simon Verity, artists and stone carvers and the architect Oliver Hill. After her father's death in 1969 the family moved to London and soon after Lil began to develop her continuing passion and concern for sustainable, humane and wildlife-friendly farming methods. At eleven she joined the Soil Association and the National Society for the Abolition of Factory Farming. Leaving school at seventeen, she worked on various farms before gaining a National Certificate in Agriculture in 1979.

In 1981 Lil Tudor-Craig was taught briefly by Cecil Collins who encouraged her to pursue a career in painting, drawing and printmaking, with subject-matter mostly drawn from the natural world. In 1984 she moved to Suffolk to live and work on a boat and also trained in navigation. In 1990 she gained the Advanced National Certificate in Wildlife Conservation, specialising in biological surveying and for some three years taught wild plant identification. She also worked on the National Rivers Authority, River Corridor and Coastal Plant surveys in Suffolk and Essex. In 2000 Lil Tudor-Craig began to work exclusively on her paintings, at this time producing in egg tempera the first in the present series. Besides her principal body of work, born of 'nothing other than my own passion and conviction', Lil Tudor-Craig has carried out occasional commissions for murals and watercolour paintings and has held one-person exhibitions in Aldeburgh (1986), Aldgate, London (1987) and Lewes (2001). Lil Tudor-Craig has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2006.

 

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