"I know your deepest secret fear", sang Jim Morrison.
The life beyond appearance has long tormented artists, delving into the
darkest corners of their psyche beneath the thin veneer of the rational
world. Their routes have been various: fantasy and dream; folklore, myth
and fairy tale; repressed memories, nightmares and madness.
Born in 1967, Lisa Stokes spent her early years on a South Devon farm. At art college she studied graphic design but, under the influence of Plymouth painter Robert Lenkiewicz, she achieved success in the 1994 BP National Portrait Competition with a severe, academic self-portrait. She eventually found painting based upon this kind of detailed observation too restrictive and began to develop a more personalised vision.
In these more recent paintings, drawing on fragmented recollections of her childhood, commonplace objects take on disturbing associations in a theatre of the mind.
