The next exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery will be a show of Lucy Mackenzie's work, including oil paintings of intimate scale, drawings and assemblages. The exhibition represents six years of the artist's work, now in the gallery and available for viewing. The exhibition opens on January 6th and closes on February 7th.

Tying all of Mackenzie's work together is an underlying motif of peace and timelessness, calm and order. Her paintings, drawings and assemblages are mesmerizing, contemplative objects that draw the viewer in, to a serene, private, and timeless world. Her practice is a devotional one in which she spends up to six months working on a painting that measures no larger than 3x6 inches, and several weeks on her colored pencil drawings. Her assemblages evolve over time, tone poems of nature created of shells, stones, rope and items she has collected over the years.

The subject of this exhibition is the still life in varying motifs and themes, with the atmosphere alternating between peaceful, contemplative and pure to playful, patterned and jaunty. For the first time Mackenzie includes a wide range of pattern as background in some of her paintings. She writes:

"A long-standing influence and inspiration has been Indian miniature paintings--for their abstract design, color pattern, and, of course, scale. Thinking back, it was probably a project on Indian miniatures at Art College that was partly responsible for my choosing to work on a small scale."

The patterns in her paintings come from fabrics she has collected over the years of Indian, African and English textiles, and decorative arts. Positive in energy, the patterned fabrics provide Mackenzie with a new palette, a new sense of freedom, play, and joy; they reveal to the viewer the artist's love of color in a fresh way. A Staffordshire black and white china dog sits pert and pretty next to a golden teacup, both in front of a spirited mauve fabric from the 1790s; a blue and yellow toy truck sits atop a block-printed contemporary black and white cotton fabric from India, a perfect icon of childhood. Both paintings are examples of Mackenzie's shift in subject matter, and her new approach to juxtaposition, creating a lively, inviting and captivating mise-en-scene.

In the past, Mackenzie's still lifes have been of simple, distilled objects set against a single color background. Certain motifs recur throughout her oeuvre as leitmotifs in the composition of her shows, Mackenzie icons. Some of her objects are ordinary, such as a dappled pear elevated by its placement on an elegantly decorated English plate or a bouquet of snowdrops, her favorite fragile flower of spring representing her love of the garden; others spring from memory and her own collections gathered over the years. This is most clearly seen in her "Pearly Nautilus" and "Box of Shells," both paying homage to the place where she spent her childhood, the Isles of Scilly. In "Pearly Nautilus," one senses ultimate peace as the curling shell reflects ambient light around it, and glows in a composition of gray and white.

Mackenzie's vision incorporates everything in her private world. Her home is a work of art filled with china, fabrics, silver, and collections of many kinds and of many eras. Everything on which her eye alights is "material" for a painting; a humble toy truck, which the artist spotted at an outdoor market in her hometown on the edge of the Cotswolds, sat on her studio table for years, before it entered a painting as subject and object. A patterned box of threads and ribbons, with scissors on the side, seems to spell a holiday spirit; a box of safety matches is perched atop a collection of beaded bracelets and necklaces, each bead a pearl of translucence. The ordinary becomes extraordinary in Mackenzie's hands. In her personal collection of objects, she touches a universal chord in the viewer. How many of us have felt the feelings she evokes in her scissor and match-box paintings? Each painting is a tiny jewel, each a touchstone to a larger story of life.

For the first time the artist shows a major body of drawings in this exhibition, sometimes echoing the subjects of her paintings: the pear, the snowdrops, and the shells. Other drawings explore simple objects, which become visual haiku in the hands of the artist; with colored pencil in Whistler shades of gray, she tenderly renders a glass of water, a cookie cutter.

In her work of the last six years, compositions carefully considered for color, shape, atmosphere, visual priorities, the viewer is privileged to "read" a philosophy that celebrates the simple pleasures of life, its joys and its sadnesses.

Lucy Mackenzie was born in Sudan, Africa in 1952 and moved to Isles of Scilly, England as a young child. She received a B.A. from Bristol Polytechnic and an M.A. from the Royal College of Art, London where she received the Princess of Wales Scholarship. The artist was awarded a fellowship at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham. She was commissioned by Lord Esher, Rector of Royal College of Art, for H.M. The Queen, for a Silver Jubilee gift from the college.

Mackenzie's work has been shown in public venues abroad at the Royal College of Art, 150th Anniversary Painting Exhibition, London; Museo Municipal, Madrid; the Welsh Arts Council Touring Exhibition; and in this country at the Fine Arts Center Galleries, University of Rhode Island, Kingston.