Dylan Lisle studied Fine Art at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. His works have the dramatic power of the Renaissance Masters, but his canvasses are romantic and accessible also. Lisle also admires Dutch artists, Vermeer and Rembrandt, and faces in his paintings share the light, clearly painted, creamy beauty of Vermeer’s figures. These lushly-painted figurative works also reflect Lisle’s interest in anatomy, and the striking poses give a bold, 21st Century edge to his work. This popular artist rightly prides himself on both skill and technique.
This is how he describes his work: ‘My work begins with the observation of light and shadow on the model. An admiration of figurative art from the 14th and 15th centuries leads me to favour dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and the inclusion of areas of drapery. This choice of lighting lends itself particularly well to dark and moody paintings’. His technique he sums up thus: ‘The majority of my work uses a combination of techniques appropriated from artists that I admire. These include Vermeer and Van Eyck’s monochromatic underpainting and glazing, Caravaggio’s complex layering and the venetian technique further developed by Titian.’
Hope Robertson summed up Dylan Lisle’s work well in 2007: ‘Dylan Lisle’s work maintains a contemporary dynamism through his old masterly representations of the female form. His work is instantly approachable, engagingly serene and romantically charged; traits that have not gone unnoticed in the art world he inhabits... Dylan Lisle spearheads a modern movement of artists, whose desire it is to capture light in all its glorious subtleties, texture in its infinite tactile qualities and the female form in its evasive beauty.’
