The inspiration of the poet

Working oil paint with a mixture of aggression and facility, Canadian-born painter Danica Lundy peels back the surfaces of objects and bodies and offers impossible X-Ray-like views through them. Often based in memories of her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, the resulting works are studies of the physical world that are also mindscapes and psychological atmospheres. In The inspiration of the poet we are granted a view through the wall of a domestic house, where a couple are engaged in a moment of study or shared work that is loaded with ominous and unsettling detail. A cup is poised to topple; the tag on an electrical cord reads ‘don’t choke’; and the corner of the carpet lifts as if it were the painted canvas itself. Every object seems to tell a story of tension and threat, as if disclosing an unease that is latent, but hitherto unseen, in this human encounter. Lundy could have been referring to this work when, in a 2020 interview, she remarked that "I started conceiving of painting as a construction site, a house that's built inside out, made without a T square, with some degree of danger and dark humour in the scaffolding around it, and all its nerves exposed like live wires."