Writings

There have always been a minority of artists, and interestingly they seem most often to have been women, who from the outset bring to their work a vision so innately their own, so realized, and so much a part of their distinctive way of its expression, that we tend to view them as apart from their time, impossible to categorise, and so perhaps even eccentric. They come with their integrity complete, and with perhaps the quality that W.B Yeats called "unity of being" which affords their work a self expressive immediacy, authentic, original and free from any obvious influence. Notably for instance, among poets, Emily Dickinson, Stevie Smith; among novelists, Jean Rhys, among painters Gwen John, William Nicolson. It is this same quality - always the more engaging because completely unselfconscious - that is the hallmark of Truda Lane's work.

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It is unusual (for all I know it's unique) for a serious artist to have devoted so much of her life to what one might have supposed was the limited means of drawing. There were paintings early on, but at the Slade already she was beginning to concentrate on drawing, for which as a student she was awarded prizes. Shortly after, she and her husband went to live in Yorkshire. "I lost my heart to that glorious North Riding landscape in a way I have not done since. And through that wild landscape I sought for human emotion and life's struggles." In these early drawings her idiom - these series of tentative lines that mysteriously discover an extraordinary strength of line, her simple but highly tensile compositions, economy of wash and hint of colour that seems emanations of the drawing itself, even the occasional startling detail that anticipates a later style - seems already established. The subjects also are simple, graphic, often severe, and intensely poetic.

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But already one is sensing her living fascination and conversancy with an inner world with its store of traditional reference and meaning. One often is uneasily aware that there are stories abroad, or maybe spellbound moments frozen from folk-tale.

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Not surprising then that later, perhaps triggered by her commissions to illustrate, this innate familiarity with, and instinctive command of folk and fairy tale, became a dominant influence on much of her work. But although this narrative sense informs many of the drawings, they are always more than illustrations. Often they achieve a feeling of captured momentary enchantment - quite disturbing , as if, true to the vein of folk-tale, the survival of the world is in the balance. Her figures too, at first glimpse mannered and a shade innocuous, are later discovered to be the fully realized inhabitants of this ambiguous inner world, and so capable of a taut and magical expression.

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In her later work she has increasingly been drawing with a brush. There is more colour - but still subdued as if true to monochrome of some secret world of enchantment. The brush brings a new freedom of line, and so maybe achieves a new dream-intensity for this real and imagined world.

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But perhaps what above all one experiences from Truda is the thrice-distilled substance of an artist who has either been granted, or who has wrested from life, the opportunity for a long and undivided and very focused commitment. The mark is profoundly realised. It is the enduring gift of a genuine artist.