Lucy O’Doherty in Paris
By Lucy O’Doherty
In the year that’s passed in between winning the 2016 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and leaving for the three-month residency at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris, I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I want to produce during my time here.
Having previously painted mostly detached urban and remote single-storey Australian architecture in depopulated landscapes, Paris is a challenging deviation of subject matter with its ornately trimmed and towering buildings and densely populated streets.
I didn’t want to go into the residency with a preconceived idea of what I wanted to make. I knew I wanted to wait until I arrived, explore my surroundings and make honest responses to moments or places or artworks that interest me. My main objective is to build up a decent amount of observational studies so that when I return to Australia in half a year’s time, I can extract different moments and combine them to make new compositions of merging memories and places from my overall journey.