Lou Blakeway: Painting Her Stories

West Midlands painter Lou Blakeway’s motivations for undertaking the fellowship were multifaceted. She felt that the time and space it provided would be vital to her development as a painter and to create a more personal language through the medium of paint.

The fellowship has offered her the opportunity to travel more widely, enabling her to see shows in Europe in order to study the work of both contemporary and historical artists. It has also allowed her the freedom to openly discuss her work with her mentors and to engage in a meaningful way with students. The fellowship has therefore given her the opportunities and resources to explore and enhance both her artistic practice and pedagogical skills. 

Lou was based in the painting studios of the University of Brighton, located in the centre of the city, for the Freelands Studio Fellowship. During her time in Brighton, Lou’s approach to her creative teaching development came through empirical learning and open-minded enquiry, in addition to the exploration of practical methods and theoretical texts by educators such as Josef Albers and Johannes Itten.

Both men taught at the Bauhaus – an early twentieth-century art school that advocated learning by experience, independent thinking and the elimination of school hierarchies. Lou encouraged her students to engage fully with their practice and have a passion for the subject, whilst allowing them to take risks and be prepared to fail. Her approach has been to listen closely to the student’s point of view, providing both encouragement and constructive feedback to assist them in developing their own art practice. 

Lou’s close listening to her students parallels her detailed attention to the working out of paintings. She paints using oils after carefully planning the composition and structure of her work. The initial drawing is integral to her process and an essential part of her painting technique.

Lou’s work is positioned within the genre of figuration and is characterised by her love of paint, its materiality, physicality and possibilities. She enjoys the ‘deliciousness’ of paint and applies it generously, with brushstrokes and colours overlapping or merging, often having the effect of a light but not heavily textured impasto.

Colour is particularly important to Lou, with each mark conveying a ‘multitude of meanings and emotions’. Her palette is limited but intentional and carefully mixed. She devotes time to creating colours, always mixing her own distinctive tones and hues from six primary colours. 

The simplicity of the palette enables her to focus more on her subjects and compositions, allowing her to create harmonious artworks. Lou’s paintings are primarily small to medium sized which is a personal preference as she feels this brings an intimacy between the work and the viewer.

However, prior to the fellowship, this choice was also due to the constraints of having limited access to a large studio space. She combines an interest in experimenting in the modernist formalism of colour, shape, line, space and composition with traditional processes of painting to create works that explore what painting can represent.

For Lou, painting is an essential part of her daily life and when not engaged in making art she is researching painting theories and techniques, and studying artists. This informs her practice and supports her development as a painter.

Lou finds inspiration through a wide variety of artists, authors and exhibitions. Painter Harold Gilman’s use of colour and meticulous planning has had a particularly strong impact on Lou. Other artistic influences include Chantal Joffe, whose honest but empathetic depictions of women challenge idealistic feminine images, as seen in Lou’s own work.

Throughout her artistic training Lou has read and absorbed the texts of artists, authors, academics and journalists. Her most recent influences include ‘Alone of All Her Sex’, Marina Warner’s cultural history of the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary as a symbol of idealised womanhood and motherhood. (1)

This feminist work resonates with Lou in her own attempts to be a good mother without conforming to the unrealistic perfection personified in the virginal Mary, an exemplar of motherhood created largely by Christian men. As does ‘Art Monsters’ by Lauren Elkin, which explores the way artists (who happen to be women) depict their bodies truthfully, challenging how we think about women’s idealised form in the canon of art. (2) 

In a similar vein, Mary Russo’s ‘The Female Grotesque’ re-examines the portrayal of the woman’s body within modern discourses of the grotesque in western culture as exaggerated, deformed or monstrous. (3) 

Lou is also interested in the ideas of Ursula K. Le Guin, whose short but influential work, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, contests fictional narratives of heroism and power told through weapons and conflict, to focus on alternative storytelling. (4) 

Similarly, Lou feels she is a painter of women’s stories that challenge paradigms of heroic strength, instead depicting them within a less confrontational world. 

In conjunction with exhibitions of artists that Lou admires, group exhibitions of women have also provided inspiration and reflection. Two contrasting Tate Britain exhibitions in 2023–24, ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990’ and ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920’, presented both the political and historical context of women artists of the past.

As a working-class woman with limited opportunities, Lou noted that the artists included in ‘Now You See Us’ tended to be women who belonged to a social class that offered them time and opportunity to practice their art, as well as study and socialise with esteemed artists. Many of the works and narratives in ‘Women in Revolt!’ related directly to Lou’s own recurring themes about what it is to be a woman, motherhood, class, and using art to protest against patriarchy.

Lou’s current practice focuses on an ongoing series of works that explore the themes of motherhood, misogyny and patriarchy whilst also challenging the hierarchies of class and gender. She highlights the hypocritical ways women and girls are often portrayed in current affairs, social media, art history and popular culture. She hopes to give women a voice, especially those who are dismissed or demeaned.

She paints women she admires and those whose stories she connects with, particularly those who have defied the societal and political constraints that dictate how women ought to behave, be perceived or be heard. She also sees womanhood through an art historical lens, reacting against the male gaze and the way women’s bodies have been traditionally portrayed as the ideal feminine. The stories that affect her most are those where women, in many cases mothers, have perpetrated or experienced horrifying acts. 

Lou’s painting ‘Leigh’ is a portrait of Leigh Ann Sabine, a woman who abandoned her five children, aged between two and 11 years, in New Zealand to pursue a life as a cabaret singer abroad. (5) Years later she murdered her husband, keeping his body for 18 years in her flat until it was discovered wrapped in plastic after her death from cancer aged 74.

The composition and colours in Lou’s painting are based on a photograph of Sabine in a hospital garden shortly before she died in 2015. Referencing the sitter’s previous occupation, she is wearing a purple crushed velvet dressing gown, pink silky pyjamas, bright red lipstick and long painted nails. Central to the painting is the whiteness of her bandaged hand, which is also reflected in the cigarette, wine glass and cigarette packet on her lap – a trinity of vices. Lou’s use of impasto highlights the crushed velvet, the heaviness of the yellow hospital blanket on her lap, the lush green vegetation and the patio stones.

However, the bright contrasting flashes of colour bely the dark history of the subject’s story. The characterisation of Sabine’s face depicts an old woman who appears defiant against her cancer but who also hid her horrific secrets to the end. Lou’s choice of subject was motivated by her desire to paint the type of woman who is rarely depicted in art. Leigh Ann Sabine was a cruel murderer, who deviated from society’s expectations of the ideal woman.  

Lou Blakeway’s work is often autobiographical, using the language of paint as a vehicle to navigate her feelings and experiences as a woman. She uses secondhand, sometimes extreme, imagery to explore firsthand experiences and emotions linked to a difficult relationship with her own mother.

Her themes also centre around women whose lives have been adversely impacted by men through violence or constraint, but she does not see those women as victims. From personal experience, she identifies and empathises with many of her subjects, painting them in order to contextualise both her life and the lives of other women who have suffered problematic relationships. 

1.  Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth & the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Oxford University Press, 2016 [1976]. 

2.  Lauren Elkin, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Chatto & Windus, 2023. 

3.  Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, Routledge, 1995. 

4.  Ursula K. Le Guin, 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction', Cosmogenesis, 2024 [1988]. 

5.  Karen McVeigh, ‘ “Why didn’t she confess?”: the killing of John Sabine’, The Guardian, 8 October 2016. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/08/why-didnt-she-confess-killing-of-john-sabine [accessed 23/10/24]. 

Lou Blakeway’s small, intimate paintings are a deeply personal and emotional response to an ongoing collection of women’s stories gathered from both reality and fiction. These are women with whom Lou has felt a strong connection, the paintings holding a mirror to the abhorrent experiences they have either endured or committed. 

Una Richmond is a freelance art historian who completed her PhD at the University of Sussex in 2023 with the thesis ‘No Second Sex in Art’. Her research focusses on highlighting the visibility of twentieth-century female artists through the study of women's group exhibitions. 

Launched in 2021, the Freelands Studio Fellowship takes place annually to connect six artists with partnered UK host universities. The programme aims to foster a symbiotic relationship between teaching and artistic practice to enrich both artists’ and students’ work, facilitated by the environment of the artist studio and within the specific context of an art school. The 2024 Fellowship concluded with a group exhibition titled 'Enfold, Unfurl’, held in March 2025.