Artist's Lay Figures, Circa 2004

Derek Carruthers  

Large abstract geometric oil on canvas of artist's lay figures intertwined by British artist Derek Carruthers. Unsigned but acquired along with other signed works from the artist's estate and with certificate from the gallery.

A wonderfully playful, colourful and energetic painting, cleverly composed of artist's lay figures emerging from a background of two planes. These figures featured often in this period of the artist's work. An artist lay figure is a doll-like model of the human figure that artists can pose in different ways. It can be used for sketching or as a stand-in for the living subject of a portrait.

"I was given an antique artist's lay figure and acquired several smaller faceless wooden lay figures. I knew Man Ray's “Mr. and Mrs. Woodman" series of photographs and enjoyed the irony and humour." So began the series of figure compositions which seem to sustain themselves as symbol and metaphor for aspects of the human condition.

These figures have inhabited Carruthers' paintings since the early 1990s. They may be placed in a fully-realised 3-D space, their solidity asserted with dramatic lighting; or they may be flat, insubstantial. They may be gathered as a busy community or they may be isolated. They are always featureless. They can be translated as a deliberately ironic comment on life; they are also evidence of the artist's continuing preoccupation with abstraction. He reduces and manipulates the figures so that they are sometimes in the Romantic tradition, a model of profound humanity, and sometimes - more challenging and chilling - Orwellian tokens of inhumanity.