About Lillian Delevoryas
"In my experience, making art has always been a natural process – like breathing - except on a longer time scale. The first half of your life is spent 'inhaling' all that is relevant to your work from the world around you in order to build up a repertoire of subjects, and learning various vocabularies which can best express them.
Then in the latter half comes the really interesting part – where your art can begin to 'exhale' all that you have absorbed – but now enriched by the emotions and experiences you've accumulated in the course of a lifetime.
In this, my second phase, I am casting a long look over my past history as an artist, drawing from each period the most important aspects which can still feed my current work, and returning to these subjects in order to perfect them. It's a kind of Proustian 'remembrance of things past', where in memory, the event or subject is distilled and crystallized – stripped of everything but its essentials."
Lillian Delevoryas, an American artist of Greek ancestry moved to England in 1970 and has made this country her adopted home. Her initial art training in the ‘50’s was in New York, at Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. After graduation, she traveled and studied extensively in Japan, France and Greece.
Now in her ‘70’s, Lillian’s repertoire covers a vast area, spanning over 50 years as an artist, which began in New York the ‘50’s and ‘60’s with large oils of interiors with nudes. Her work has been exhibited extensively in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
When she came to London in 1970, her work shifted to appliqué wall hangings and appliqué garments for the world of high fashion and show business. During this period she produced many wall hangings and tapestries for private individuals as well as churches and public spaces.
In 1972, she married the writer Robin Amis, and moved to the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. This marked the beginning of her long and fruitful love affair with the English country garden whose profusion of colour reinforced her already strong love of pattern,. Her exuberant flower watercolours created a precedence in this genre, which up to then was characterized by a botanical precision. They quickly found their way into the world of design, and formed the basis of a tapestry needlepoint workshop which she created in partnership with Kaffe Fassett. The work produced from this venture won many awards and were exhibited widely in such places as the V & A Queens Jubilee exhibition, as well as the Royal College of Art and ‘Threads of History’ at Celanese House. In the ‘80’s, the work spun off into further areas of applied design including a range of fabrics and wall paper for Designers Guild, ceramics for Habitat and Royal Doulton, and cards for Elgin Court.
From the mid ‘90’s onwards, she was influenced more and more by the icons of Greece and Russia, and for several years, devoted herself to studying the techniques of iconography in order to penetrate its secrets as well as to sharpen her own technique in painting. This gradually led to a series of works which combined the iconesque image with images of the world.
More recently, she has returned to images of the ‘60’s, when she was a young painter in New York. There is so much vitality in these works that they have the power over the years to recapture the original impulse but with the maturity of decades of painting.
The author, Hilary Spurling (‘Matisse the Master’) had the highest praise for the art of Lillian Delevoryas: ‘
‘… of all your paintings that I like so much this Red Reflection is perhaps dearest to my heart - I love it for its calm & depth & space - its lovely rhythms & its deep rich dark colours, its tawny yellow and sea greens, its blacks above all. Most of all because it carries on such an interesting dialogue with Matisse, something very few can do as clearly and directly as you do. The fact is I can't say why it touches me so deeply any more than I could about a piece of music - it lights up my life .
We have hung it on a green wall next to a big Matisse etching - la danseuse cambrée - v. simple but almost my favourite of all his etchings, partly for the honesty and humour of the subject, but also for the liveliness and confidence of the thick greasy sliding curling line itself. It was the picture I beggared myself to buy in homage & celebration when my book was finished. Not many pictures can hang next to it but yours is perfectly at home in his company. Thank you more than I can say…’
