Natasha Law

Eleven Gallery, London

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the backgound tends more towards plum/purple in the original. The catalogue illustration also fails to convey the glossy texture of the red and plum areas in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is slight wear to the lower left, right and upper right corner tips with associated paint loss. There are intermittent rub marks along the extreme left and right edges with associated paint loss. There are tiny spots of surface dirt throughout and regular rub marks throughout the glossy areas of the composition.
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How do you approach the act of painting?
There are always a few images floating around in my mind that I want to try and recreate as a painting. Usually I get interested in capturing the body involved in an action or activity that I can 'still' for a brief second and zoom in on. In that process of freezing a moment something happens to make it almost epic, or at least poignant - or at least that's how I feel about them! I take photos and collect photos found in magazines - any bit of imagery that catches my eye - often these never get used but they can stay in my mind and a feature can find its way into a painting, either as a colour combination or as a mood or theme that I find I want to develop. The process of trying to recapture or recreate something of that mood with models then takes it off in a new direction, on a tangent all of it's own as they bring their own interpretations of what I describe to them to the piece and take the idea in a direction that is personal to them. I rely on that vagueness between what I describe and what they understand from that to capture something unique to each person I draw. At the point when I transfer the drawing to the metal and work out the painting it all changes again - and the scale and crop starts to have an impact on what kind of piece it's going to be.

What is impetus behind your work?
I remain hugely influenced by the documentary; disposable direction photography took in the 1990s emerging out of Japan. Actually many of my influences are photographic - Annelies Struba, Valerie Philips - capturing the female body in very casual moments. I get drawn to colour and meeting of shapes and colours in a kind of magpie way. Legs in socks, arms out of t-shirts, body against a patterned sofa - maybe that's just part of being alive in the 20^th century.

How would you sum up your oeuvre?
There is no way that I can claim to belong to any particular movement - no matter how much I'd like to. I have left college and worked on my paintings for the past decade in total isolation.  The biggest source of encouragement I get comes from stumbling across people working in a way that strikes a chord of recognition - the Flat art movement in Japan and the meeting of graphic and fine art. I love Jun Hasegawa, Kyoko Murase and Yoshitomo Nara. But there are painters going back to Tom Wesselmann who also strike a chord in how they had fun with the graphics and shapes a body can be composed of and contemporaries such as Cecily Brown, Elizabeth Peyton, and Vanessa Beecroft. Perhaps in the end though there is a very long and old tradition of female nudes to which I am just adding my own take.
(Natasha Law in Conversation, 2007)