In choosing the title Chasing That High for her 2006–07 series of paintings illustrating the awkward sexual groping of teenagers, Lisa Brice refers both to the subject of the works and her own methodology in making them.
Unless it is firmly resisted, a drug high, once experienced, is sought out again and again, and the same can be said for the emotional high that comes with the pulse-racing excitement of sexual encounters. The young men and women in Brice’s paintings are all clothed, suggesting the covert, the casual coupling in inappropriate domestic or public spaces—under tables, on kitchen floors, on trains and planes.
Brice draws her images from a variety of media sources, including her own personal photos of herself and her friends, then often uses the same image again and again in successive paintings, craving the rush of getting the new painting together, but making it work differently. “There are an infinite number of ways of working with a single image and ideally I would like to try them all. I’m interested in how the mood and reading [of the work] shifts each time,” she says.
In one unconventional and experimental process, the artist starts with denim—the universal fabric of youth—stretched over the frame, and works with bleach to remove the blue dye of the fabric and create her tones. Trained in printmaking at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, and graduating in 1990, Brice likens this process of working from dark to light to certain printmaking techniques, like mezzotint.
The Base One Two Three show in 2007 at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, which featured the Chasing That High work, was Brice’s second show of painting after years of making installations and sculptural mixed media pieces, often addressing themes of violence and threatened domestic security, like her Make Your Home Your Castle installation at the Cape Town Castle in 1996. Soon after that exhibition, Brice left Cape Town to enter the international art scene and has been living in London for the past decade.
The first show marking her return to painting was Night Vision at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, in 2006, a sellout show that took as its theme the fears and anxieties of a small child. Wilderness (2005) recalls the extreme discomfort of a little girl, based on a photograph of the artist as an awkward being, feeling herself under critical observation by peers and adults alike.
For an artist who made her reputation on hard-hitting installations and object works on themes of adult fear and alienation, painterly images of childhood and adolescent love and sex might seem to be something of a departure, but the common thread in Brice’s powerful work is her attempts to access the strongest moments of sensation in our lives.
Shadows Falling, Baby, We Stand Alone 2007
Emulsion, gesso, ink and bleach on canvas
91 x 61 cm
Private collection
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Lisa Brice
Chasing That High Series 2007
Oil on tracing paper
21 x 29.5 cm
Private collection
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Lisa Brice
Wilderness 2005
Oil on canvas
183 x 244 cm
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Lisa Brice
Suckface (The Kinks) 2007
Bleach and dye on denim
122 x 76 cm
Image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Lisa Brice