West Bay Westerns

For her latest series of paintings, Dorset artist Trish Wylie drew on her love of film – particularly action-packed tales of the Old West

Outside Trish Wylie’s airy studio in West Bay, near Bridport, seagulls strut aggressively across the roofs. They flap large powerful wings, scrape tiles with razor-sharp claws and exude a level of testosterone that seems strangely congruent, yet conversely at odds with the iconic imagery of Trish’s current body of work – paintings that are set among desert sands, thousands of miles from this lazy English seaside resort.
Inside the studio, giant canvases portray imagery from classic Western films when men like Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner filled cinema screens with a powerful macho
presence. That presence is given a compelling resonance in Trish’s new work. The current series began with work on an image inspired by ‘The Magnificent Seven’, a 1960 Western directed by John Sturges about a group of hired gunmen tasked with protecting a Mexican village from bandits. The image, painted onto three giant canvases, was the start of an extensive flurry of activity that has taken Trish’s career to a new and exciting level.
It all began on a Sunday afternoon when she looked at the TV guide to see what was on. “I don’t know why I was reading a TV guide,” says Trish, “because I didn’t even have a television”. There on the list of films for the day was ‘The Magnificent Seven’, with a small image of the seven stars of the film. “And I was really fed up that I couldn’t watch it,” she says. “Then, suddenly, it was like a light bulb went on, and I thought: I have the skills to paint this stuff, I’m going to paint a picture. And I got really excited and couldn’t sleep thinking about it. I went out and bought these three very large canvases and painted the Magnificent Seven image from that TV guide. It was purely for myself – I had no plans to do another one, as the work I was doing at the time was very different.”
However, Trish found that she was tapping into something deep within herself. She was bringing together her passion for film and art into a fusion that has captured the imagination of collectors from all around the world. The paintings can take weeks to complete, partly because the process includes watching films over and over again before finally settling on the frame to work with, but also because Trish works in layers that add a depth to the work that isn’t easily apparent in print. She takes inspiration from an extensive catalogue of DVDs and books from the Old West. They are iconic images – predominately male, macho, rugged and tough. Ironically, the first image Trish chose to paint was one used for promotional purposes that didn’t actually make it into the film.
Bridport-based graphic designer David Rogers is uniquely qualified to comment on Trish’s work. He describes the process:
“In her paintings Trish combines aspects of popular culture with those of classical portraiture, applying glazes of thinned paint to build layer upon layer of colour and texture. This technique, combined with the projection – digital-translation – of the original image, highlights her continuing concerns with surface, colour and abstract form, even when the painting’s conclusion is figurative. Her working practice is to extract an image, a fragment from the original narrative, interpret in paint and allow
the viewer to recall and replay the cinematic experience. The delay gives the viewer time to convert the multi-layered audio/visual collage – a subconscious image that does not exist – back into a tangible medium.”
David highlights Trish’s interest in working with materials in her work. “During her career as an artist, her concerns have been the exploration of the material process of image making. Whether in ink/graphite on paper, or paint on canvas, the techniques
and application of colour, shape and form
to a surface in the creation of an engaging image has driven the narrative of the work. Her present body of work capitalises on
this exploration of material, extending the painting’s narrative by addressing icons and ideals previously existing only in our subconscious – a transient frame from which we recall the visceral experience of the cavernous space of the cinema, populated
by giants.”
Populating her canvases with giants became part of the development process, as Trish explained at a recent exhibition in Bridport. She said: “After the initial painting, which by comparison to the way I’ve developed how I’m working now is quite crude, I then decided that I would like to adhere to cinema screen ratios. I was lent a data projector and with a DVD player was able to play a film and stop it at any point I wanted to. And as there’s twenty-four frames per second, you can imagine how many possible paintings there are in one film.”
The option of creating many different paintings from cinema imagery is exciting for both Trish and the gallery owners who find her paintings are selling fast. She is currently busy creating new work for a solo exhibition at the Belgravia Gallery, Albemarle Street, London in October. It follows a successful show in London, when she first exhibited her new paintings alongside work by Andy Warhol, Peter Blake and Damien Hirst. She has since exhibited at
The Bridport Arts Centre with an exhibition entitled ‘Gee Gee Fury Cheyenne Bang!’ – the first words her parents ever heard her
say and a testament more to the influence of her nine siblings than to the power of popular American culture in her life at the time. That culture was, however, to have a profound effect later on and has resulted in work that should keep her in demand for some time to come.