Lettie Blackett 'INDIA: Paintings from the Road'

INDIA: Paintings from the Road is the first London show by the emerging Scottish artist, Lettie Blackett (b.1983). Her impressionistic style beautifully captures the spirit of the hustle and bustle of everyday life in India whilst avoiding any clichéd imagery.

Her paintings offer a fleeting glimpse of calm amid the chaos.Lettie is largely self-taught and as such has retained a unique style especially concerned with the representation of light, movement and colour. She works predominantly in oil paint and often introduces materials into her work which she’s picked up on her travels, such as posters, shopping bags and postage stamps. In this recent body of work she has also used 19th century photographs within her paintings as a commentary to the relatively unchanged face of India .

An avid traveller, Lettie believes that travel and painting complement one another; enabling her to retain a freshness of looking which is crucial in helping her work to evolve.

In 2010 she completed a series of paintings following a trip to northern India. They were eagerly collected and brought her much recognition and so by popular demand she returned to India to work on a new series. With her sketchbook for company she set off alone. Arriving in Delhi she fell under its spell and used it as a base from where she embarked on various journeys, each lasting a number of weeks. These wanderings took her from Rajasthan to Goa and finally to the lush southern tip of Kerala.

Her new series of work will be exhibited in its entirety this May at her solo show in London at The Strand Gallery.