Spotlight on an Artist: Louise Mansfield (1950 - 2018)

Louise Mansfield was born in Dublin in 1950 and began painting from a young age. The Mansfield household was, and still is, a creative one. Her mother and father both had creative pastimes in embroidery and painting, and today her brother, Keith, works as a landscape artist while her sister, Thelma, is also a painter. While always a creative spirit, Mansfield was not always an artist in the traditional sense - she also had a short lived career in her early years as an artist of the stage, touring the North of Ireland with the Shakespearean Company. After her stint in both modelling and acting she eventually turned her hand to painting.

Mansfield never had formal art training, and so, this allowed her to develop her own unique and distinctive style. Her artwork is easily identifiable through her fluid brushstrokes that evoke movement on the canvas. She worked in a conservatory she had built onto her South Dublin home, and the bright and airy atmosphere that she worked in is very clearly reflected onto each and every one of her canvases.

The subject matter of Louise Mansfield's work is generally very consistent; the themes of children by the sea as well as young women dancing are both prominent throughout her work. Her unique approach to movement and light through paint is seen clearly in this month’s auction as we have three paintings by Louise Mansfield.

Lot 271 & 272 are both examples of Mansfield’s ‘Ballerina’ series, with one figure in red, and the other in white. In both works by Mansfield, the parts of the composition that are to represent movement are painted using a thick impasto approach, white the static parts of the image are painted with a much thinner consistency and closer to the canvas. Lot 270 veers ever so slightly away from Mansfield’s traditional subject matter, in that the children in the composition are on a boat rather than on the beach; however, the maritime theme still holds strong.