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Megan Menzies:Tears for Ears
Megan Menzies:Tears for Ears
2023
Signed
Oil on canvas
45 1/4 x 55 1/2 inches
Detail from ‘Tears for Ears’
Detail from ‘Tears for Ears’
Megan Menzies practice centres on an exploration of memory, personal experience and storytelling. The experiences she depicts are often melancholy moments, as the artist describes it, ‘where time thickens and small details are valued and intensified.’ Taking these moments as a point of departure for her paintings, Menzies presents them in imagined, often dreamlike, spaces that allow room for their heightened expression. Building her compositions through the use of symbolic colour and rich layers of paint, Menzies’ formal experimentation is a response to and means of exploring her fascination with the act of looking, and how this experience is inflected by memory, identity and feeling.
Detail from ‘Tears for Ears’
In Tears for Ears, the figure tilts their head away from us, hiding their face as mascara-marked tears run down the side of their face. Menzies’ closely cropped composition amplifies this feeling of sadness. The painting evokes a visceral response in the viewer as the heads of wheat gently tickle the side of the figure’s face: we can feel their touch and that of lying on the ground as we can the warm tears that flow from their eyes. Menzies creates a richly textured surface through the varied application of paint, a hazier sky and blotchy skin tone give way to a more precise rendering of the tears and the figure’s hair as it spreads across the grass. This playful application suggests the unreliable nature of memory where outlines and details come in and out of focus, as well as the atmospheric shifts in the environment as the mood of the painting alters.
THE STUDIO
B. United Kingdom1995
Biography
Megan Menzies’ practice centres on an exploration of memory, personal experience and storytelling. The experiences she depicts are often melancholy moments, as the artist describes it, ‘where time thickens and small details are valued and intensified.’ Taking these moments as a point of departure for her works on canvas, Menzies begins a prolonged period of reflection, building her compositions through extensive exploratory sketches and observations.
Menzies presents these memories and reflections in imagined, often dreamlike, spaces that allow room for their heightened expression. The artist’s formal experimentation is a response to and means of exploring Menzies’ fascination with the act of looking, and how this experience is inflected by memory, identity and feeling. Colour is used symbolically, often layering pink hues on her figures and landscapes, Menzies seeks to recreate a rose-tinted nostalgia and sense of blushing as she reflects on these memories. Building her canvas in layers, pushing the possibilities of the paint, use of superimposition and glazing combine to render her compositions hazy with a richly textured surface.
Menzies (born 1992) graduated from University of Bristol with a BA in History of Art in 2016, before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Her work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions in the UK and Europe and she is a 2022 Now Introducing Prizewinner from Studio West, London and a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant in 2021.
Menzies lives and works in London.