Three Skirts

Painted in 1985 and subsequently included in the travelling exhibition Current Affairs: British Painting and Sculpture in the 1980s, Lisa Milroy’s Three Skirts demonstrates the artist’s fascination with objecthood. In the present work, Milroy’s titular skirts are warmly tactile, and her expressive, at times loose, brushwork emphasises the sheen and weight of the fabrics. Seeking to confer a heightened presence and a palpable aura to her subjects, Milroy has rendered the skirts in isolation, set against a neutral background. Three Skirts is part of a larger cycle of still life paintings that the artist worked on during the 1980s, most of which were completed in a single day; speed, she believed, was essential for maintaining the connection between ‘thought and action’ (L. Milroy interviewed by L. Biggs, May 2011, https://www.lisamilroy.net/c/4/texts/p/8/painting-fast-painting-slow-2011-lisa-milroy-interviewed-by-lewis-biggs). Time itself is a central preoccupation for the artist, both practically and thematically, and Milroy is drawn to the oxymoron contained within the term ‘still life’, a classification that is simultaneously animated and inert. ‘The term “still life” signals the fundamental experience of painting for me,’ Milroy has said, ‘encapsulating my fascination with the relation between stillness and movement, contemplation and action. I’ve always appreciated Manet’s observation that still life is the touchstone of the painter’ (L. Milroy, quoted in R. Duguid, ‘5 Questions for Lisa Milroy’, Elephant, 22 January 2018). Indeed, in the suspended reality of Three Skirts, time is impossibly paused. It is a hermetic realm severed from the rhythms of daily life, a moment that will neither age nor erode.