I’m delighted to present HELD STILL an exhibition of recent paintings by Louisa Risch. Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and at Charles H. Cecil Studios, Louisa is an active and thriving portrait painter. She balances this commercial side of her artistic practice with her still life paintings, which are the focus of this exhibition. Created in the privacy of her home studio they are thoughtful meditations on the effects of light over objects and the possibilities of oil paint to describe them. After carefully considering the props, composition and lighting of each still life she attacks the subject at speed in the alla prima style (wet paint on wet paint), a rapid technique that requires great confidence with the medium.

Louisa’s paintings remain firmly in the realist camp. However, this should not be understood as a strained effort to capture fussy detail. Rather, she presents us with something recognisable that emerges from the clever arrangement of shapes and stylish abstract brushwork. We see her delighting in the way the objects participate and interact, each painting acting as a little puzzle about scale and reflection. She clearly revels at the challenge of rendering differenttextures and surfaces, and this enjoyment in the painting process is no doubt what makes her still lifes so pleasing to look at. Her style in this sense owes much to Manet, Sargent and most of all William Nicholson (1872-1949). Like Nicholson, the strength of Louisa’s paintings lies in their tension between modernism and classicism; that is, a loose application of academic technique and a personal vision of painting from life. As with all good paintings they reward first hand viewing and I look forward to welcoming you to the gallery this October to view HELD STILL.

James Astley Birtwistle, October 2025