Ollie Tuck

Description

One of the bolder works in the collection, Kaffe Fassett Lobster revels in the very thing that might ordinarily be toned down: competition. Lobster, ground and pattern all vie for attention, creating a painting that feels exuberant without losing its structure. Ollie’s studio holds a drawer that is quite literally spilling with fabric, scraps collected over years for their colour, pattern and possibility. It has become a kind of working archive, and throughout Small Pleasures she repeatedly returns to textiles as a way of testing how far a still life can be pushed. Gingham, florals, checks and high-chroma prints are not treated as backdrops so much as active participants in the composition.
Here, Ollie creates an ode to the textiles of Kaffe Fassett, the celebrated textile and embroidery designer known for his saturated colour and richly patterned designs. Ollie had owned the material for years but had never quite found a way to make it work. That changed as she began experimenting with bringing the background more decisively into focus. “The fabric in this painting has been encouraged to come forward and draws the eye as much as the lobster,” she explains. The challenge, then, was not simply to paint the lobster against a patterned ground, but to hold both in balance. With little tonal contrast to rely on, the image depends on brush texture and carefully placed highlights to describe form. The result is a painting in which subject and setting refuse to fall neatly into a hierarchy. As Ollie puts it, “I love the interplay of pattern with the lobster and how they both compete for attention.”