After embarking on a Foundation Course at Wimbledon Art School and receiving an MA degree in Art History from St Andrews University, Lottie moved to Luoyang, Henan Province China to teach English for a year. Since graduating Lottie has continued to paint and work as an illustrator as well as working for a number of arts organisations including the National Portrait Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery. She continues to work at the London Library – which has been inspiration for some of the work.
She has exhibited in a number of group shows including the National Art Open competition, Affordable Art Fair and at Cricket Fine Art, Chelsea.
Lottie Cole’s latest collection of paintings celebrates the places most familiar to her. Having lived and worked in Westminster for over a decade, she revels in the architectural diversity of the area, especially the sense of buildings developing over time, accruing their own different styles and characters. For the last seven years she has worked at the London Library, in St James’s Square, whose labyrinthine book stacks and winding staircases hold a particular fascination. Walking through these well known streets of the capital, she responds to the feelings invested in the buildings as they change through the day: twilight is a favourite time, when the streets begin to take on an unfamiliar character.
David Fraser Jenkins writes:
‘It is not so often that you can call a roomful of new paintings a treat, but it is out of the ordinary that such a vision as this, a bit akin to the expressionist tradition, should have been let loose on day-to-day, middle of London, street-houses. Lottie Cole’s pictures depend first on her noticing an interest, and then on making up the image in walls of colour. But there is a secret agenda. Having found a place, and taken a photograph, and imagined it anew, the next stage is the placing of a ground colour across a whole canvas, whitish, or grey, or a warm orange. What comes next, the painted image, has always been in dialogue with this lovely, textured surface. The colours skim over it, placed as in the temperas or frescos of some Lorenzetti, to fabricate angles, junctions and heaps, but nevertheless remembering the flat skin of the ground, like a parchment body, that balances and orders and holds together the ins and outs of the buildings.
‘It is not surprising that Lottie Cole likes the overlaps and crowded muddle of London buildings that have grown up together over a long time. It is this forced conjunction of characters that is most responsive to her fantasy colouring, that allows patterns of pinks and blues to fall about the exteriors like precious stones in a treasure trove. The buildings are of an age, mostly, and what is ever going to happen to them is largely over, and they can settle down, and get given a bit of plaster or pointing from time to time. These are London’s buildings seen on an early Sunday morning walk, with no one about, and nothing swanky in sight but the weathered, diverse, surviving containers of so many lives. This view of the city is far from the concepts of architecture, or the classification of ornament, or the drawing board, but finds its personalities huddled together in a good English conversation.’
